Ethnic Nationalism and the Fallndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/51687/1/39.pdf.pdf · 2020. 7. 10. · Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empiresis a wide-ranging, comparative

Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires is a wide-ranging, comparative study ofthe origins of today’s ethnic politics in East Central Europe, the former Russianempire, and the Middle East. Centered on the First World War era, EthnicNationalism and the Fall of Empires highlights the roles of historical contingency andthe ordeal of total war in shaping the states and institutions that supplanted thegreat multinational empires after 1918. It explores how the fixing of new polit-ical boundaries and the complex interplay of nationalist elites and popular forcesset in motion bitter ethnic conflicts and political disputes, many of which are stillwith us today. Topics discussed include:

• The disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian empire• The ethnic dimension of the Russian Revolution and Soviet state building• Nationality issues in the late Ottoman empire• The origins of Arab nationalism• Ethnic politics in zones of military occupation• The construction of Czechoslovak and Yugoslav identities

Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires is an invaluable survey of the origins oftwentieth-century ethnic politics and provides an important reassessment of theFirst World War era in relation to the current turmoil in East Central Europe,Russia, and the Middle East. It is essential reading for those interested in thepolitics of ethnicity and nationalism in modern European and Middle Easternhistory.

Aviel Roshwald is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University inWashington, DC. He is the author of Estranged Bedfellows: Britain and France in theMiddle East during the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 1990) and co-editor with Richard Stites of European Culture in the Great War: The Arts,Entertainment and Propaganda, 1914–1918 (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Ethnic Nationalism and the Fallof Empires

Ethnic Nationalism andthe Fall of EmpiresCentral Europe, Russia and theMiddle East, 1914–1923

Aviel Roshwald

London and New York

First published 2001by Routledge11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EESimultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

© 2001 Aviel Roshwald

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted orreproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafterinvented, including photocopying and recording, or in anyinformation storage or retrieval system, without permission inwriting from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataRoshwald, Aviel.Ethnic nationalism and the fall of empires: Central Europe, Russia,and the Middle East, 1914–1923 / Aviel Roshwald.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.1. Europe, Eastern – Politics and government – 20th century.2. Nationalism – Europe, Eastern. 3. Europe, Eastern –Ethnic relations – Political aspects. 4. Middle East – Politicsand government – 1914–1923. 5. Nationalism –Middle East – Ethnic relations – Political aspects. I. Title.DJK48.5 .R67 2001320.54'09’041–dc21

00–042475ISBN 0–415–17893–2 (hbk)ISBN 0–415–24229–0 (pbk)ISBN 0-203-18772-5 Master e-book ISBNISBN 0-203-18895-0 (Glassbook Format)

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001.

To the memory of my mother, Miriam Roshwald

“Identity is not something separate from responsibility, but on the contrary, is itsvery expression.”

(Vaclav Havel, as quoted in The New York Review of Books, 5 March 1998, p. 46)

List of Maps xiAcknowledgements xii

1 Introduction 1

2 Ethnicity and Empire: An Historical Introduction 7The Austro-Hungarian Empire 8The Russian Empire 19The Ottoman Empire 28Epilogue 33

3 On the Eve of War: The Intelligentsia as Vanguard ofNationalism 34Conflicting Nationalist Agendas in East Central Europe 36

Poland 36Czechs and Slovaks 42The Dream of Yugoslav Unity 46Synopsis 48

Populism, Socialism, and Nationalism in the Russian Empire 49Social Elites and Nationalist Intellectuals in the Ottoman Empire 57

From Ottomanism to Turkish Nationalism 57From Ottomanism to Arab Nationalism 63

Conclusion 67

4 Straining the Imperial Molds, 1914–1918 70War Front, Home Front, and the Politicization of Ethnicity in the Habsburg Empire 71

Loyalties on the (Front) Line 73The Czech Home Front 78The South Slav Lands 84Synopsis 88

The Ethnic Dimension of War and Revolution in Russia 90Nationalism and Separatism under the Provisional Government 92The Socio-Cultural Bases of Ethnic Unrest 94

The Burden of War in the Middle East 104The Radicalization of Turkish Nationalism 105The Suppression of Dissent in the Arab Lands 111

Conclusion 114

Contents

5 NewArenasof Action:Nationalismsof OccupationandExile, 1914–1918 116Zones of Occupation 116

Poland and Lithuania 116Serbia 125

The Politics of Exile 128The Czechoslovak National Council 129The Yugoslav Committee 132The Polish National Committee 138Zionism 140Synopsis 145

Volunteer Legions 146The Czechoslovak Legion 147Piłsudski’s First Brigade 149The Arab Revolt 152

Conclusion 155

6 Defining the Boundaries of the Nation, 1918–1923 156Defining Frontiers in East Central Europe 157The Political Geography of Soviet Ethnofederalism 171

The Ethnic Dimension of Russian Political Collapse and Civil War 171The Soviet Ethnofederal Experiment 174

Reconfiguring the Boundaries of Identity in the Middle East 183The Turkish Settlement and the Kemalist State 183European Imperialism as Framework for the Genesis of

Middle Eastern Nation-States 187Statehood vs. Nationhood in the Arab World 189Sectarianism and Ethno-Regional Politics in the Framework

of Arab Nationalism 192Conclusion 196

7 Old Elites and Radical Challengers in the New Nation-States, 1918–1939 198Institutional Continuities and Disaffected Ethnic Groups: the Czechoslovak and

Yugoslav Cases 201Czechoslovakia 201Yugoslavia 204

Revolutionary Elites in Reactionary Roles: Poland and the Arab Middle East 207Poland 207Syria and Iraq 211

Conclusion 215

8 Conclusion 218

Notes 224Index 264

x Contents

1 Nationalities in the Habsburg Empire 92 The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and the First World War in Eastern

Europe, 1918 1213 The Peace Settlement 1919–1923 1584 Federal Structure of the USSR, 1939 1755 Partition of the Ottoman Empire, 1920 184

Maps

This book could not have been written without the encouragement, support, andadvice of many friends and colleagues. I am very grateful to the following peoplefor reading and commenting on portions or all of my various draft manuscripts:Gábor Agoston, Tommaso Astarita, Steven Beller, David Goldfrank, MacGregorKnox, John McNeill, Steven G. Marks, Jerry Z. Muller, Richard Stites, and theanonymous readers commissioned by Routledge. I also appreciate the feedbackand comments of the Catholic University, Department of History facultyseminar on material from an early draft of this manuscript. My thanks also go tothe history editors at Routledge, Heather McCallum and Victoria Peters, whopatiently supported and encouraged this endeavor. Needless to say, whateverflaws the book contains arise from my own shortcomings.

It is also a pleasure to thank Georgetown University, which provided me withgenerous assistance in undertaking this enterprise, in the form of sabbaticals,Graduate School summer grants, and the warm support of many colleagues.

My dear wife, Alene Moyer, and my two delightful stepsons, Joseph andMartin Hood, brought great joy, love, and an invigorating spirit of irreverenceinto my life amidst the trials and tribulations of completing the final version ofthis book. I am deeply thankful to them for that.

I am indebted to my parents, Mordecai and Miriam Roshwald, for main-taining a keen interest in this project throughout its prolonged gestation, and forhelping keep alive my own faith in its value. My mother would have been mostdelighted to see the finished product, and it is to her memory that this book isdedicated.

Washington, DCApril 2000

Acknowledgements

Nationalism and the idea of the nation-state are among the most pervasive polit-ical phenomena of our age and among the least well understood. So interwovenare they with contemporary social, cultural, economic, political, and diplomaticinstitutions, so deeply embedded in political psychology, so broadly influential inthe shaping of human identity and socio-political behavior, that it is almostimpossible to tease nationalism apart from the sundry elements with which itinteracts or of which it forms part and to study it as a thing unto itself. Is it anideology or an anthropological phenomenon? Is it an outgrowth of liberaldemocracy or is it inherently intolerant and conducive to authoritarianism? Is itan aspect of modernity or a reaction against it?1 These are stimulating andproductive questions to ask, but ones to which there is no definitive responsebecause each of them can be answered both in the affirmative and in the nega-tive, depending on what historical context and which manifestation or form ofnationalism one has in mind.

This book does not approach nationalism with the assumption that it can bemade to fit any single framework of analysis or typological category. Rather, it isconcerned with exploring how nationalism evolves over time and how its ideo-logical orientations and institutional manifestations are redefined andtransformed by historical forces. More specifically, it focusses on a critical water-shed in the evolution of a significant number of contemporary nationalisms: thebreakup of multinational empires into independent states deriving theirdomestic and international legitimacy from the principle of national self-determination.

The monographic literature on discrete nationalist movements highlights therole of historical contingencies, individual personalities, cultural peculiarities,and geopolitical idiosyncrasies in shaping national identities and nation-states. Ittends to focus on certain key events that are seen as having a critical, long-termimpact on the subsequent development of national consciousness, politicalculture, and institutional structures among ethnic majorities and minorities alike.

Much of the theoretical literature on nationalism is, by contrast, absorbed bythe analysis of the formative impact on nationalism of impersonal, macrohistor-ical forces such as industrialization, the growth of the state, and the spread ofliteracy and mass communication. Such approaches have produced remarkable

1 Introduction

insights at a very high level of generalization, yet they are also inherently limitedinsofar as they tend to treat the development of nationalism as though itproceeded at a relatively even, incremental pace, and as though its full manifesta-tion (itself an idealized and problematic concept) were dependent upon thecompletion of certain material changes that transform the inner workings ofsociety and produce nationalist forms of political identity. Miroslav Hroch’smuch-cited study of nationalism among the small nations of Europe, forinstance, posits an ideal developmental typology in which the emergence of full-fledged national consciousness is the culmination of a three-stage process ofintellectual fermentation, patriotic agitation, and mass mobilization, all linked toa carefully timed sequence of capitalist growth and industrialization. Cases thatdepart from this paradigm may result in stunted nationalisms or the absence ofany well-defined national identity, and, once missed, the opportunity can appar-ently never be regained.2

I do not dispute the role of deep historical forces in shaping nationalistconsciousness and the modern nation-state, nor do I reject the utility of certaindevelopmental paradigms, provided they are taken with a grain of salt. Yetapproaches that focus disproportionately on such factors run the risk of lapsinginto a historical determinism that is in some ways analogous to the teleologicalmentality that pervades many nationalist ideologies. In the mythology of nation-alism, national identity attains its fullest expression when a movement that mayhave begun as a small band of activists has succeeded in mobilizing the massesaround one common conception of nationhood. The attainment of independentstatehood is conceived of either as the culmination of this process, or as a step inits progressive realization. In practice, however (as recent events in EasternEurope and the Soviet Union illustrate), the trappings of political sovereigntyoften come within the reach of nationalists suddenly and unexpectedly, underextraordinary and short-lived circumstances arising from a regional or globalcrisis rather than from strictly internal developments. If not grasped immedi-ately, the opportunity to establish a separate polity may not recur for generations.But the attainment of political independence under such circumstances cannotbe regarded as part of the ineluctable course of history, nor can the specific insti-tutional and territorial forms that independence takes be seen as the inevitableoutgrowth of an incremental process of social and political evolution.

In other words, the sudden onset of independence is often the result of short-term, exogenous factors. Once established under such circumstances, a sovereignnation-state is likely immediately to confront profound internal divisions overhow to distribute wealth and power and what political values should animategovernment and society. In the aftermath of “liberation,” a liberal-nationalistintelligentsia may suddenly find itself marginalized in a polity whose broaderpublic is not receptive to its ideas. The overnight transition in the roles of nation-alist leaders from resisting the authority of imperial states to wielding power overnation-states may produce deep contradictions between ideological rhetoric andpolitical practice. Old socio-political elites may try to co-opt nationalist themesand symbols in order to legitimize their own continued hold on power. The flow

2 Introduction

of resources, goods, and services may be drastically disrupted by the drawing ofnew frontiers across regions that once formed integrated markets; the resultanteconomic problems are likely to exacerbate political tensions within the newstates. Ethnic groups that find themselves unexpectedly reduced to the status ofminority communities may react by forming separatist movements of their own.In brief, the particular circumstances of a nation-state’s creation can have adramatic impact on its subsequent evolution, closing off various potential pathsof development for nationalist movements and creating a radical new field forthe crystallization of national identities – a point that most historical mono-graphs take for granted and that most theoretical works ignore.3

This book seeks to help bridge the analytical gap between the monographicand theoretical literatures by adopting a broadly comparative approach to thetransformative events that shaped nationalist movements and identities in EastCentral Europe, Russian-dominated Eurasia, and the Middle East during thebrief span of years from the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 to the rati-fication of the Treaty of Lausanne and of the ethnofederal constitution of theUSSR in 1923.4 The collapse of the three (Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman)multinational empires toward the end of the war and the circumstancessurrounding the emergence of their successor states set in motion patterns ofdevelopment that continue to shape national identities in these regions at theturn of the millennium.5

Having criticized some of the developmental paradigms that have come toinform the theory of nationalism, I must also acknowledge that I have not beenable to do without them. This book’s organizational scheme clearly reflects thenotion that most nationalist movements begin as intellectual trends, develop intopolitical organizations that seek to expand their popular base through propa-ganda and agitation, and in some cases succeed in going on to establishindependent nation-states. But the idiosyncrasy of the cases addressed here isthat the First World War telescoped some stages of their development into a verybrief period of time. The war created unusual opportunities and tremendouspressures that served to catapult the idea of national self-determination towardsudden realization across a wide range of societies. To be sure, the cultural,economic, and political conditions in these various lands were extremely diverse;what these cases all have in common is that their transition to political systemsbased on the idea of national self-determination was very sudden, rather thanthe result of a steady, evenly paced process, and that it took place within theframework of a common, external contingency – a war that transformed theshape of global politics. Each chapter accordingly focusses on an evolutionaryphase or framework of development that these diverse cases shared in common,while at the same time stressing the differences in their material and culturalenvironments as well as the variation in social and political responses of nation-alist movements to some of the sudden pressures and common dilemmas thesepeoples faced.

In undertaking this project, it has not been my intention to be encyclopedic incoverage. The geographical range encompassed by this topic is enormous, andit would be impossible to be comprehensive in this account or even to give

Introduction 3

honorable mention to every one of the hundreds of ethnic groups that occupiedthe length and breadth of the three empires. Moreover, any attempt to giveequal attention to every region and each people would limit my ability to exploreand compare individual cases with any degree of analytical depth. The typicalchapter section will accordingly include a brief narrative overview of develop-ments throughout a given imperial sphere, and then narrow its focus to selectedcases that can serve to illuminate the book’s broad themes. In East CentralEurope, for example, this book pays particular attention to the Polish,Czechoslovak, and Yugoslav states and to their pre-1918 political antecedents,for these cases illustrate with particular clarity the strains between supraethnicand ethnonational conceptions of nationhood that all of the movements andpolities in the region – and, indeed, in all three imperial or post-imperial spheres– had to contend with.

In general, the emphasis here lies on the empires’ subject nationalities – thosepopulations whose languages, and/or religions, and/or historical and culturalidentities, marked them apart from the hegemonic cultures (German andMagyar, Russian, and Turkish, respectively) of the Habsburg, Romanov, andOttoman empires, and among whom a desire to seek some form of autonomy orindependence within newly drawn territorial boundaries was most likely to takeroot. By the same token, we cannot altogether disregard political movementsamong dominant nationalities – e.g. pan-Turkism or Russian pan-Slavism – thathad a profound impact on subject peoples, or, indeed, that served to define othergroups as subject peoples.

Finally, while I have tried to pay equal attention to the three empires, inplaces, some empires will appear more equal than others. This is partly becausenot every theme, issue, or developmental aspect manifested itself as dramaticallyor clearly in one region as in another. It also reflects the fact that the mono-graphic literature for any given period – especially for the war years themselves –is not nearly as extensive for some areas (notably the Arab world and the Russianempire, 1914–1917) as for others.

This leads me to another disclaimer: I make no pretense here of bringing tolight original material on any given ethnic group or nationalist movement. Thisbook is a historical synthesis, and its contribution will, I hope, consist in itsbringing a comparative perspective to bear on the events in question. Drawingon secondary literature rather than archival sources, I have tried to bringtogether this wide variety of cases under a common analytical rubric byfocussing on a number of interrelated, overarching issues that most nationalistmovements have had to face.

One such problem is how to integrate the masses into movements that areusually initiated and led by intellectual or socio-political elites. This raises thebroader question of how ideologies propagated by elites interact with massconsciousness in the crystallization (or, indeed, fragmentation) of national identi-ties.

Another pervasive issue involves the tension between the origin of themodern nation-state as a specifically Western European or Euro-Atlantic ideo-

4 Introduction

logical and institutional creation, and the role it is supposed to play as anauthentic embodiment and guardian of each nation’s particular culture. On theone hand, nationalist movements around the world have modeled themselves onWestern political prototypes and aspired to lead their countries on the road tomodernization; on the other hand, they are determined to use the nation-state asan instrument for cultivating their own peoples’ heritages and guarding againstthe erosion of their historical identities. How to reconcile these apparentlycontradictory roles was an ongoing problem for many of the movementsdiscussed here.

This brings us to the distinction between civic and ethnic forms of nationalism.These are useful typological categories employed by much of the contemporaryliterature.6 The term civic nationalism refers to the assertion of a population’scollective identity and of its right to political-territorial sovereignty based on itsadherence to a common set of political values and on its common allegiance toan existing or prospective, territorially defined state. In its historical origins, it isclosely associated with the development of West European countries such asBritain or France, where relatively strong, centralized monarchies emerged inpre-modern times, constituting sturdy political-cultural molds within which state-wide national identities eventually gelled, under the impact of homogenizingforces such as economic development and commercial integration, the bureau-cratization of the state, the growth of public education, and the development ofprint media, electoral politics, and mass communication.7 Because, in principle,civic nationalism is inclusive of all who choose to participate in the commonpolitical culture, regardless of their parentage or mother tongue, most authorsassociate it with liberal, tolerant values and respect for the rights of the indi-vidual.8

Ethnic nationalism is a phrase used to denote the assertion of a collectiveidentity centered around a myth of common biological descent – an extension ofthe kinship principle to a large population – and, as its corollary, a claim to terri-torial sovereignty. The term can also refer to any movement that focusses oncommon, objective cultural characteristics (linguistic, religious, folkloric, or anycombination thereof) as the foundation of political nationhood. Modern ethnicnationalism originated among intellectual elites in nineteenth-century Centraland Eastern Europe, who were alienated from imperial states (or from sub-national principalities, as in Germany and Italy) that lagged behind the WestEuropean pace of political and economic modernization, and that could not orwould not accommodate new elites’ aspirations to political empowerment. In themultiethnic empires, populations were culturally and linguistically so diverse thatany assertion of the modern notion of popular (as opposed to dynastic)sovereignty was likely to unleash centrifugal rather than integrative forces (withfragmented Germany and Italy representing the inverse of this pattern). Becauseof its fascination with the idea of the nation’s organic unity, rooted in commonancestry and/or expressed in specific cultural forms, ethnic nationalism is seen asconducive to intolerant, chauvinistic, and authoritarian forms of government.

In this book, I have taken the liberty of using these terms in reference to avariety of political movements and ideas. It should be understood that this

Introduction 5

application of recent social science terminology to early twentieth-century move-ments is anachronistic. I hope it may be excused insofar as it provides a commonframe of reference for the comparison of diverse political cultures. At one andthe same time, I must stress that I wish to avoid simplistically categorizing entirepeoples as belonging to either the ethnic or civic nationalist camps. It is my sensethat more interesting questions can be posed about the nature and evolution ofnationalist ideologies if one thinks of ethnic and civic elements as cohabitinguneasily, and competing, with one another within any given construction ofnational identity.9 It is indeed one of political liberalism’s greatest challenges tofind ways of reconciling the principle of civic equality with the ethno-culturaldimension of collective identity.10 As will become readily apparent, my interestin this problem, and my frustration with the difficulty of resolving it, lends muchof the discussion that follows a distinctly normative edge. For this I make noapologies. The human cost of ethnic nationalism taken to its logical conclusion isall too apparent in our day, as is the futility of pretending that civic identity canbe defined in culturally neutral terms. To take a dispassionate interest in thehistory of this problem is to take no interest in it at all.

A further note on terminology: in this book I will use the terms “ethnic group”and “nationality” interchangeably to denote a population sharing commoncultural characteristics and/or seeing itself as being of common descent orsharing a common historical experience. “Nation” will refer to any group thatthinks of its common identity (however defined) as a basis for claiming someform of collective, political-territorial self-determination, or any population in itsaspect as a group on behalf of which such claims are made. “Nationalism” refersto any ideology based on the articulation of such claims and that serves as theframework for political action designed to further them. “Nation-state” willsignify a polity that bases its legitimacy on its claim to embody or represent theidentity of a sovereign nation (however controversial such a claim may be).Clearly, there is considerable room for overlap among these various notions.11

6 Introduction

This book focusses on the development of nationalist movements within thethree multiethnic empires that were destroyed by the First World War: theAustro-Hungarian empire, the Russian empire, and the Ottoman empire. Eachof these enormous and unwieldy political entities had taken shape through aprocess of gradual territorial accretion and incremental military conquest overthe course of hundreds of years. As of 1914, each of them had been ruledcontinuously for several centuries by a single dynasty. By the same token, allthree regimes had recently permitted (or been forced to accept) the creation ofelected parliaments, institutions whose very existence could be seen as funda-mentally incompatible with the principle of monarchic authority.

The emergence of electoral politics was one of the most visible manifestationsof the process of economic and socio-political change that was engulfing thesesocieties. The imperial regimes faced the prospect of modernization withprofound ambivalence. On the one hand, they sought to promote industrial andcommercial development, educational advancement, technological innovation,and administrative reform as a means of catching up with the spectacular accu-mulation of material wealth and military power by the world’s major industrialstates (Britain, Germany, France, the United States). On the other hand, suchchanges threatened the authority of existing institutions and undermined thestability of social hierarchies. The exposure of hitherto isolated rural economiesto the vagaries of global commodities markets, the social and geographicaldisplacement of economically marginalized populations, the emergence of spir-ited new social elites eager for a share of power, the growth of cities, thecrystallization of an urban working class, the birth of mass movements, broadexposure to Western ideas and values – these characteristic features and side-effects of modernization were manifest to varying degrees in the three empires.Even in their most embryonic form, such changes were deeply unsettling toestablished traditions and modes of thought. All three regimes were hard put tofind a way of reaping the benefits of modernization without calling into questiontheir own legitimacy.

One of the most universal features of political modernity has been the ideathat the state is an expression of popular identity. Such notions were essentiallyincompatible with the authoritarian monarchism of the three empires. Yet these

2 Ethnicity and EmpireAn Historical Introduction

regimes recognized that the ability fully to mobilize the energies of society wasthe ultimate test of a modern state’s power. Their dilemma was how to meet thischallenge without undermining the dynastic, patrimonial principles that formedthe basis of their political legitimacy. The multiethnic composition of theHabsburg, Russian, and Ottoman empires made this problem particularlydaunting: any attempt to stimulate patriotic emotions among the masses almostnecessarily involved an appeal to their ethno-cultural identity; yet unleashingsuch sentiments among any given segment of a highly diverse population couldonly serve to alienate all the other segments.1

If exploiting the politics of ethnicity carried enormous dangers, ignoringthem was impossible. Some of the most basic, technical aspects of the modern-ization process, such as standardizing the languages of education andadministration, became explosive political issues as ethnic minorities feared thattheir tongues or dialects would be marginalized and that their opportunities foradvancement in the system might become limited.2 Economic development andfuller integration into global markets tended to have a highly differential impacton these multiethnic societies: members of some nationalities (such as Greeksand Armenians in the Ottoman empire) were well positioned to take advantageof it while other ethnic groups were economically marginalized; the result, ofcourse, was an aggravation of ethnic tensions. Nationalist ideas seemed to attachthemselves to every imaginable social and political movement. Even socialismoften achieved its greatest potency as a mobilizing force when it incorporatednationalist themes. The haphazard, inconsistent policies pursued by the imperialregimes only aggravated interethnic tensions and stimulated separatist senti-ments among their subject peoples. Moreover, the geographical propinquity ofthe three empires, combined with the often hostile relations among them,provided their governments with tempting opportunities for the incitement ofethnic troubles across each other’s borders.

In the multiethnic composition of their populations, and in the consequentdilemmas and challenges that their regimes faced, the three empires bore somestriking resemblances to one another. But of course, there were also significantdifferences in the dynamics of ethnic relations within each state and in the poli-cies pursued by each government. A brief overview of the evolution of ethnicpolitics in each empire is therefore in order.

The Austro–Hungarian Empire

Of the three empires, Austria–Hungary was the most exclusively dependent onthe dynastic principle for its legitimacy. No single ethnic group formed anoutright majority of its population, and the ethnic Germans, who were one of itstwo dominant nationalities, constituted a minority of Europe’s overall Germanpopulation, most of which had been incorporated in Bismarck’s unified Germannation-state in 1871. It was therefore impossible to think of the Habsburgmonarchy as the political expression of any particular ethnic identity or nationaltradition. It seemed to many observers of the Austro-Hungarian political scene

8 Ethnicity and Empire

Map

1N

atio

nalit

ies

in th

e H

absb

urg

Em

pire

Sour

ce: A

lan

Sked

, The

Dec

line a

nd F

all o

fth

e Hab

sbur

g E

mpi

re©

Lon

gman

Gro

up U

K L

imite

d 19

89, R

epri

nted

by

perm

issi

on o

fPe

arso

n E

duca

tion

Lim

ited

that if the empire were to make a successful transition to political modernity itwould have to do so as a model of interethnic tolerance and transcendent civicharmony, guiding the rest of Europe beyond the quicksand of militant nation-alism. In light of the catastrophic fate that befell its constituent peoples after itscollapse, the Habsburg empire came to be viewed with nostalgia by many, as anoble internationalist experiment that somehow failed. In fact, however, no suchexperiment was ever undertaken. Instead, a series of awkward improvisationsand unsatisfying compromises on the part of an ever more desperate rulinghouse served to aggravate the frustration of, and hostility among, the subjectnationalities.3

The empire originated as a patchwork of principalities and kingdoms boundtogether in a personal union under the Habsburgs, whose power base was thegroup of southeastern German hereditary lands referred to as Austria,4 andwho, with only one brief interruption, consistently held the title of Holy RomanEmperor. The kingdoms of Bohemia (the Czech heartland) and Hungary – towhich Croatia had been attached since the twelfth century – entered intodynastic union with the Habsburg lands in 1526–1527. Over the followingcenturies, the Habsburgs confronted the Ottoman Turks, whose imperial expan-sion encompassed the entire Balkan peninsula and most of Hungary’s territory.Indeed, the Turkish threat had helped precipitate the union of kingdoms underthe Habsburg crown. Following the unsuccessful Ottoman siege of Vienna in1683, the Ottomans began to fall back, with the Habsburg domains growing atOttoman expense. To the north, the late-eighteenth-century partitions of Polandamong Prussia, Russia, and the Habsburg monarchy left the latter in control ofGalicia, Poland’s southern province.5

Drawing their dominions together into a consolidated state with relativelyuniform laws and institutions ultimately proved to be a Sisyphean task for theHabsburgs: the more progress they achieved in this direction, the more resent-ment they incurred among their subjects. The Habsburgs’ efforts to centralizestate power flew in the face of the historic status of Bohemia and Hungary asdistinct states. In the Battle of the White Mountain (1620), Bohemia’s aristo-cratic elite was defeated in its attempt to use Protestantism as a vehicle forchallenging Habsburg authority. But the Hungarian gentry, which had alsorevolted, negotiated an early peace settlement that secured it an amnesty and leftits corporate institutions intact.

By the late eighteenth century, the Habsburgs’ right to uniform successionwithin their various territories had gained international recognition. In 1804, thereigning Habsburg monarch declared that his possessions taken together consti-tuted a hereditary empire – a whole that was greater than the historic states thatconstituted its parts.6 But during the nineteenth century, the traditional assertionof historic state rights merged with the new doctrine of liberal nationalism in achallenge to autocratic institutions generally, and to the legitimacy of Habsburgrule specifically. The 1848–1849 revolutions took the form of nationalist upris-ings in many of the monarchy’s provinces, including Bohemia and Hungary.

Although the separatist movements were brutally crushed, the regime’s


attempt to follow up on its victory by pursuing an energetic program of central-ization ended in failure. Its defeat in its war against Piedmont–Sardinia andFrance in 1859 (paving the way for Italian national unification), and its humilia-tion in the Austro-Prussian war of 1866 (which led to German nationalunification), left the Habsburg state shaken. The Hungarian elite took advantageof the situation to negotiate a historic compromise (Ausgleich) in 1867. TheHungarians extracted a high price for their continued loyalty to the Habsburgs:full self-rule for the Hungarian kingdom in all spheres other than military andforeign affairs. Personal union under the Habsburgs was not to be called intoquestion, but Austria (a term thenceforth used to refer only to those lands thatremained under Vienna’s direct jurisdiction) and Hungary were to be recognizedas separate and equal political entities under the joint aegis of the Emperor-King. The Habsburg ruler’s title was thus modified to reflect the distinctionbetween his status as Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary.7 The politicaland administrative division of the state was reinforced by the establishment ofseparate Austrian and Hungarian parliaments8 in what had become a constitu-tional Dual Monarchy. In some respects, it could be said that the imperial wholewas no longer greater than its parts. The army remained as one of the last majorunitary institutions of a very disunited polity.9

The Ausgleich was a great victory for Magyar (ethnic Hungarian) nationalism.But it did not represent the general triumph of the principle of national self-determination in the Habsburg empire. The landed gentry – and urbanprofessionals of gentry background – who formed the Magyar ruling class justi-fied their demand for self-government by referring to the historical rights of theirkingdom. The socio-political foundations of Hungarian government remainedvery conservative. The vote was restricted to a propertied elite, and this had adisproportionately negative impact on the electoral power of the ethnic minori-ties that made up almost half of Hungary’s population. In general, Hungary’sleaders approached the nationalities question with a double standard: theyregarded the Magyars’ right to self-determination within Hungary’s historicborders as sacrosanct; the other ethnic groups (such as Romanians, Serbs,Slovaks) were considered culturally inferior peasant peoples who could aspire tonothing higher than assimilation into the Magyar nation. There was to be noquestion of political autonomy for them, and even promises of culturalautonomy soon gave way to repressive policies aimed at Magyarizing the educa-tional system right down to the elementary school level in linguistically distinctregions such as Slovakia.

The only exception to this trend was the region of Croatia–Slavonia, whosehistoric status as a kingdom in its own right, if permanently attached to theHungarian crown, was grudgingly reaffirmed by the Magyars in an 1868 agree-ment (the Nagodba). Even in this case, the self-rule granted was very limited, anddid not correspond at all to the broad autonomy Hungary had won from Viennathe year before.10

In the Ausgleich, then, the Magyar ruling class had not only obtained extensivefreedom from Vienna’s authority, but had won the power to deny political and

Ethnicity and Empire 11

cultural freedoms to Hungary’s own ethnic minorities. The Magyars also vigor-ously opposed any plans for the devolution of power to ethnic groups in Austria,for fear that a dangerous precedent might be set for Hungary. The Habsburgs’historic compromise with Budapest therefore constituted a permanent obstaclein the way of any more systematic reform of the imperial administration. In anycase, disputes among the nationalities in the Austrian half of the empire seemedto grow ever more intractable as time went on, while for their part the Habsburgauthorities continuously gave mixed signals to the various groups without evertaking a decisive stand on any issue.

In Austria, German-speakers constituted the dominant element in the admin-istration and army. Many members of the political elite were of non-Germanethnic background, but had adopted the German language and culture as theprice of admission to the ruling circles. However, members of other ethnicgroups outnumbered Germans by a margin of two-to-one in the western half ofthe empire. In Galicia, which enjoyed a measure of administrative autonomy,Poles constituted the local political and bureaucratic elite. However, in easternGalicia, the Ukrainian11 peasantry was the largest ethnic group, while theregion’s major towns and cities were populated largely by Poles and Jews.Bukovina, to the southeast of Galicia, had the most diverse population in theempire, including Ukrainians, Jews, Romanians, Germans, and others, none ofwhom had a clear majority. In the northwest sector of the empire lay theprovinces of Bohemia and Moravia – the homeland of the Czechs. There wasalso a sizable minority of Germans concentrated along the mountainous fringesof Bohemia (the region later referred to as Sudetenland). Southeast of German-speaking Austria lay the South Slavic zone – provinces inhabited by Slovenes,Croats, Serbs, and Serbo-Croat-speaking Muslims, alongside an admixture ofother nationalities (including Germans in partly Slovene Styria and Italiansalong the Dalmatian coastline).12 Finally, South Tyrol had a mixed German andItalian population.

The difficulties of ruling over this ethnographic showcase were exacerbatedby the conflicting demands and expectations of the various ethnic groups andthe high degree of territorial overlap among them. Members of the Polish land-owning gentry (szlachta) of Galicia considered themselves the rightful rulers ofthe province by virtue of their historical role as the governing elite of thePolish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Their hegemony was disputed byUkrainians. The Czech social and political elite insisted that their historic home-land – the kingdom of Bohemia – should be accorded autonomy on theHungarian model. But any concession on Vienna’s part to the Czechs instantlyraised a chorus of protests from the large ethnic German minority in Bohemia.In general, Austria’s German-speaking elite, which included many assimilatedmembers of other nationalities, was convinced that its language was the pre-eminent medium of high culture and civilization in Central Europe. Indeed,Austro-German liberals were in the forefront of those who decried the assertionof non-German language rights in provincial administrations as an impediment


to progress. Right-wing pan-Germanism, on the rise from the 1880s on,contributed to the further polarization of ethnic relations.13

The most complex – and ultimately fatal – ethnic problem faced by theHabsburgs was one that straddled the administrative division between Austriaand Hungary, and that extended beyond the empire’s borders as well. This wasthe problem of the South Slavs – the speakers of Serbo-Croatian.14 There werefive distinct provinces in the Habsburg empire that were inhabited by Serbs,Croats, or both. The southwestern Hungarian province of Vojvodina was largelySerb in population; Croat-populated Dalmatia and Istria fell under Austrianjurisdiction. As we have seen, Hungary controlled the nominally autonomousprovince of Croatia–Slavonia (which contained a sizable Serb minority). Finally,Bosnia–Herzegovina, whose population was an ethnic mix of Serbo-Croatian-speaking Muslims, Serbs, and Croats, was jointly administered by Vienna andBudapest.

Nowhere in Europe was the project of constructing national identity plaguedby more ambiguity than among the South Slavs. Serbs and Croats were dividedby their identification with distinct historical state traditions, different churches(Serbian Orthodox and Catholic, respectively), and different alphabets (Cyrillicand Latin). Yet the Serbs and Croats spoke the same language, as did Bosnia’sMuslims.15

The result was a variety of nationalist projects – some conflicting, otherscomplementary. There were those who contended that there was a South Slav(Yugo-Slav) nation greater than the sum of its ethnic parts, which potentiallyincluded not just speakers of Serbo–Croatian, but also the linguistically andgeographically proximate Macedonians to the south and Slovenes to the north.This notion first found expression in the work of the early-to-mid-nineteenth-century Croatian scholars and intellectuals who called themselves Illyrianists anddedicated themselves to forging cultural ties between Serbs and Croats on thebasis of their presumed common history and origin. In the mid-to-late nine-teenth century, the attempt to build cultural bridges among the South Slavs wascarried on by a Croat bishop from Slavonia, Joseph Strossmayer (1815–1905),who founded the Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences in Zagreb in 1867,and who also sought to foster political cooperation between Serbs and Croatswithin the Habsburg monarchy.

This cooperative vision of Serb-Croat relations was challenged by AnteStarčević (1823–1896), founder of the Party of (Croat State) Right. Starčevićresponded to contemporaneous Greater Serbian political schemes by articulatingan exclusivist Croatian nationalism. He insisted that Croatian political rightswere rooted in the historic legacy of the Croatian kingdom, and had been collec-tively inherited by the Croatian people from the nobility that had founded thestate in early medieval times. The Party of Right claimed that all the South Slavlands comprised part of this historic kingdom and, in fact, that people claimingto be Serbs or Muslims were simply Croats who had lost touch with their trueidentity under the impact of foreign conquest and alien influence. A number of


Serb nationalists duly responded by suggesting that Croats and Muslims wereactually nothing more than Serbs suffering from false consciousness.

The ethnic Serbs of Croatia–Slavonia looked beyond the borders of theHabsburg empire to the independent kingdom of Serbia as a frame of referencefor their own political identity. The potential for conflict betweenAustria–Hungary and Serbia was increased by the Habsburgs’ official annexa-tion of the formerly Ottoman province of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, afterthirty years of de facto occupation. This action provoked a wave of vitriolicdenunciations on the part of the Serbian government, which itself laid claim tothe province. In the following years, the Serbian authorities mounted a propa-ganda and agitation campaign among ethnic Serb youth in Bosnia, whilenationalist officers in Serbian military intelligence recruited young Bosnians toundertake terrorist actions against the Habsburgs. This enterprise culminated inthe fateful assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevoby a Bosnian Serb in 1914.

While many of the nationalist programs outlined above were shaped byethnic elites’ interpretations of legal and historical precedents, there was also astrong populist/democratic element to the politics of ethnicity in turn-of-the-century Austria–Hungary. The concept of historic state rights had long beenassociated with the notion that the land-owning gentry constituted the nation.The elites had not considered the lower classes capable of developing a politicalconsciousness, and certainly had not thought of themselves as sharing a commonidentity with the peasantry. But the example of the French Revolution had lentgrowing force to the idea that peoples rather than states were the ultimate reposi-tories of political rights. The intelligentsia – intellectuals and educatedprofessionals with an active interest in cultural and ideological issues – wasparticularly receptive to such notions, which could be used to challenge authori-tarian institutions and legal structures standing in the way of political changeand economic reform, and which could also provide a framework of collectiveidentity for members of rising middle classes who did not fit into any of thetraditional corporate divisions of society. As early as the late eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries, intellectuals among many nationalities had embarked uponprograms of historical scholarship, ethnographic research, literary revival, andmyth-making, in a self-conscious effort to build bridges between high andpopular cultures and to construct the framework for a unified national conscious-ness transcending corporate boundaries and class differences. The experience ofthe 1848 revolutions – where class divisions had frequently undermined thesuccess of gentry- or bourgeois-led nationalist struggles16 – had demonstratedthe importance of mass mobilization for the success of any challenge to theestablished order. The writings and actions of the Russian narodniki (populists) ofthe second half of the nineteenth century, with their cult of the peasantry asrepository of authentic national values, also influenced many of the Habsburgempire’s nationalist movements. The result was an increasing tendency on thepart of nationalist intellectuals such as Ante Starčević, and even among estab-lished socio-political elites such as the Magyar and Polish gentries, to fuse the


traditional discourse of historic state rights with the modern rhetoric of popularsovereignty and national self-determination.17

While the synthesis of historic claims with populist agendas could serve as apowerful propaganda tool, it contained some obvious contradictions. If popularidentity was a critical factor in determining national rights, then discrete ethnicgroups falling within a single province’s historic frontiers (such as the Germans ofBohemia or Ukrainians of eastern Galicia) must have collective political rights oftheir own. Yet most nationalists were unwilling to abandon the historic state rightframework, precisely because it tended to justify territorial claims that wouldseem extravagant if popular will and ethnic identity were the sole admissiblecriteria. Czech leaders demanding autonomy for Bohemia and Moravia werereluctant to abandon all claim to the German-inhabited districts that formedpart of the historic kingdom of Bohemia. Poles regarded all of Galicia as part oftheir heritage and resisted any effort by Ukrainians to challenge their politicalsupremacy throughout the province. The Austro-Germans faced a particularlyvexing quandary, for their state tradition was intrinsically imperial rather thannational in character. National self-determination for the Austro-Germans wouldentail separation from the Habsburg empire and merger with the unitedGermany to the north, as radical pan-Germans in fact called for.18 Most Austro-Germans, however, voted for parties that unequivocally supported the territorialintegrity of the empire while advocating policies that would further institution-alize the hegemonic status of the German language and culture throughout thewestern half of the Dual Monarchy.19

The attempt of the “historic” nations20 to have their cake and eat it too onlyserved to provoke members of other ethnic groups into cultural “revivals” andnationalist programs of their own. In the absence of indigenous aristocraciesand with their populations often composed overwhelmingly of illiterate peasantswho spoke a variety of dialects, many of these ethnic groups entered the nine-teenth century without so much as a uniform literary language. A handful ofuniversity-educated scholars often played critical roles in selecting one dialectover another as the basis for a standardized tongue. Thus, in the mid-nineteenthcentury, Ludowít Štúr succeeded in establishing the dialect of central Slovakia asthe basis for a standardized Slovak language; this enhanced the distinctiveness ofthe Slovak tongue, whose western dialect was much more difficult to distinguishfrom standard Czech.21 Since they were hard pressed to come up withconvincing historical claims to cultural autonomy or self-rule, such movementsfocussed heavily on populist themes, particularly on the romanticization ofpeasant culture. This tendency was a distinguishing characteristic of the Slovak,Slovene, and Ukrainian nationalist intelligentsias, among others.22

The advance of modernization in the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies had both centrifugal and centripetal effects on Austro-Hungariansociety. It seemed to point the way toward the consolidation of national identi-ties, while concurrently deepening the divisions among the various nationalities.Industrialization and urbanization drew displaced peasants into cities, fosteredthe growth of middle classes, and eroded differences among people from


different regions and speakers of different dialects. Improved communicationand transportation systems, the rising rate of literacy, and the growth of thepress, all served as catalysts in this process. Yet modernization did not progressevenly throughout the empire; it had a highly differential impact on the DualMonarchy’s various regions, ethnic groups, and social classes, and this bredintense resentments among them.

This pattern was most marked in the many cases where socio-economic statuscorresponded closely to ethnicity. While the last vestiges of serfdom had beenabolished during the 1848 revolutions, economic development and administra-tive consolidation left subject peoples feeling more vulnerable than ever to thewhims of their traditional masters. The steady advance of commercial agricul-ture was profitable to Polish and Magyar landlords who could afford to developeconomies of scale, but left Ukrainian and Slovak smallholders and tenantfarmers seriously disadvantaged. The growth of intrusive state bureaucraciesstaffed by speakers of one language alienated those to whom it was a foreigntongue. New paths of upward social mobility were open to those who wereeducated in the hegemonic cultures. Correspondingly, literate strata of subjectnationalities felt discriminated against by such a system and were particularlystrongly motivated to press for their own ethnic group’s cultural and administra-tive autonomy. Schoolteachers and parish priests absorbed the ideas ofnationalist intelligentsias and, in turn, helped disseminate them among themasses.23 Among some of the Slavic peoples of the empire, the Sokol (Falcon)movement – founded in the 1860s by Czech nationalists and soon spawningsister organizations among the Habsburg empire’s other Slav peoples – usedgymnastic exercise as a means of expressing and instilling a nationalist ethos ofdisciplined solidarity and youthful vigor.24

Ethnic groups that enjoyed economic success did not automatically becomesatisfied with their status in the empire. On the contrary, the growth of aneducated bourgeoisie and politically conscious working class often led to raisedexpectations of self-rule – expectations that the state could not or would notaccommodate. For example, Bohemia became the most highly industrializedregion in the empire,25 and the Czech middle classes and intelligentsia enjoyed agrowing sense of prosperity and self-confidence. But the presence of a largeethnic German population in their midst prevented Vienna from devolvingpower to the region; to do so would have granted administrative dominion toCzechs over Germans – a prospect that the latter militantly opposed. Variousefforts to divide the pie or fudge the issue left both sides feeling embitteredtoward the Habsburg authorities and more hostile than ever toward each other.By the 1890s, urban riots and street clashes between Czechs and Germans hadbecome a favored form of political interaction, and even the Reichsrat was thescene of violent clashes between Czech and German deputies.26

The correlation between modernization and the crystallization of diversenational identities was so strongly marked in Austria–Hungary that the AustrianSocial Democrats – who constituted the empire’s main Marxist party – wereobliged to recognize the power of national identity as an independent factor


with tremendous potential influence over the behavior of the working masses. Attheir Brünn (Brno) Congress of 1899, the Social Democrats debated a motion bythe South Slav delegation in favor of extraterritorial autonomy as the formulafor resolving Austria–Hungary’s nationalities problem. Although the Congresswas only willing to ratify a modified version of the proposal, the idea of extrater-ritorial cultural autonomy was further developed and placed in a theoreticalframework by two of the party’s leading ideologues, Karl Renner and OttoBauer. These men reached the startling (for Marxists) conclusion that the growthof a modern industrialized proletariat would contribute to the consolidation ofnational identities, rather than their dissipation. The peasant populations thatconstituted the demographic reservoirs of the proletariat lived in relativelyisolated rural communities with idiosyncratic dialects and customs and parochialmental outlooks. As long as these conditions prevailed, the overarching sense ofnational consciousness remained confined to the ruling classes, the educatedelites. But industrialization and urbanization were breaking down the barriersthat stood in the way of cultural integration. Under the impact of mass literacy,the growth of the print media, and the increased mobility of labor, homoge-neous national identities based on broad communities of culture were emerging.As long as capitalism survived, class conflict would stand in the way of fullnational integration, but socialism would bring about complete vertical socialintegration and, with it, the final crystallization of unified nationalcommunities.27

To be successful, therefore, socialists would need to find a way of reconcilingtheir Marxist advocacy of economic and political centralization with individualethnic groups’ right to cultural self-expression. The formula of extraterritorialautonomy was designed to do just that. Every citizen of the reformed empire,regardless of his or her place of residence, would be registered as the member ofa particular national group. Each nationality would elect, and pay a portion ofits taxes to, its own communal council. Each council, in turn, would be respon-sible for financing and administering its people’s cultural and educationalinstitutions throughout the empire. Wherever a group of co-ethnics resided as aminority in a district where the predominant language was alien to them, theycould incorporate themselves and draw on their national community’s budget tofinance their own local schools, orphanages, museums, legal-aid organizations,etc. The standard division of a state into territorial units of administrationwould thus be complemented by the creation of extraterritorial, national-cultural institutions. This form of expressing national identity would not stand inthe way of the inter-national economic and political integration called for byMarxist doctrine – on the contrary, it would facilitate it. Ethnicity would essen-tially be depoliticized: all citizens would be subject to the same laws and wouldbe free to settle wherever they chose, while enjoying the option of establishingautonomous cultural institutions regardless of whether they constituted aminority or majority of the population in any given province. Labor and capitalwould flow freely and members of the working class would cooperate fraternallywith each other, secure in the knowledge that they could freely express and


cultivate their national identities wherever they lived.28 While orthodox Marxistsattacked extraterritorial autonomy as a plan that would fragment the proletariat,the ideas broached at the Brünn Congress and developed by Renner and Bauersoon found very interested audiences among socialist groups in the non-Russianborderlands of the tsarist empire.29

Despite their enlightened embrace of multicultural diversity, the AustrianSocial Democratic Party’s German and Germanized Jewish leaders and ideo-logues30 never really abandoned their assumption that German language andculture would eventually prevail as universal media of communication and inte-gration. Interwoven throughout much of their writings is the belief that Germanis the language of Central European civilization, administrative rationalism, andcultural enlightenment – and that the Slavic peoples operate at a lower culturalplane; in the long run, socialist development and the spread of German culturewould go hand in hand with one another.

The Habsburg experiment with constitutionalism failed to defuse ethnic tensionsin the empire. In 1907, universal manhood suffrage was established in Austria,but the democratized electoral system only seemed to aggravate the polarizationamong ethnic groups. All political parties were based on ethnic and regionalloyalties, whether they acknowledged it or not. Parties represented in theReichsrat organized themselves into ethnic blocs, such as the Czech and PolishClubs. Even in the socialist camp, the largest bloc in the Reichsrat, ethnictensions could not be surmounted, as the Czech members of the Austrian SocialDemocratic Party broke away to form their own party in 1911. Close coopera-tion sometimes occurred between ethnic blocs in the Reichsrat, such as theCzechs and the South Slavs, but these alliances were usually effective only atblocking threatening initiatives proposed by German deputies. It seemed impos-sible to form a working parliamentary majority that could push through apositive legislative agenda for Austria as a whole. The stalemate of the demo-cratic process left the Habsburg authorities with no option but to rule by decreeover the western half of their fractured empire. In Hungary, ironically enough,an attempt by the Magyar government to wrest even more powers away fromVienna was blocked in 1905 by the threat of an imperial decree that would haveestablished universal manhood suffrage in the eastern half of the empire (andwould thus have given the vote to the non-Magyars who constituted half ofHungary’s population). In the final analysis, the structure of the empire was suchthat its survival was inseparable from the survival of its dynastic-authoritarianinstitutions. The Habsburgs employed elements of constitutionalism and democ-racy very selectively and quite cynically, as instruments with which to play theethnic groups against each other in a classic game of divide and rule.

By the same token, it would be misleading to characterize the empire in 1914as poised on the brink of utter disintegration. Few of its nationalist movementsadvocated full independence for their peoples, many of them had but tenuousconnections in any case with the masses they claimed to represent, and theHabsburgs were often tactically astute – if strategically obtuse – in their manipu-


lative approach to ethnic politics. With the outbreak of the First World War,however, the rules of the game began to change too fast for the Habsburgs’adaptive ability.31

The Russian Empire

In the tremendous diversity of its ethnic composition, the Russian empire outdideven the Habsburg state. The ethnographic map of Russia was a collage thatincluded dozens of major nationalities and hundreds of small ones. TheCaucasus mountains alone were home to scores of different peoples speakingtongues from at least three distinct linguistic families. Islam predominated inTurkestan, the Central Asian (Kazakh) steppe, and much of the Caucasus,Buddhism among groups such as the Buryats in the Far East, and even animismamong some small Siberian peoples.

This bewildering diversity was offset by the fact that just under half theempire’s population (43 per cent as of 1897) was composed of Russians, theethnic core group from which the ruling elite was largely drawn. This contrastedsharply with the roughly 23 per cent German share of the Habsburg empire’spopulation.32 Moreover, the tsarist empire represented the only possible frame-work for the political expression of Russian nationalism – a situation verydifferent from that of Austria’s as an ethnic German-dominated empire lying onthe geographical fringe of a dynamic, recently unified, German nation-state.There existed only one Russian-populated state in the world, and this state’stendency to associate itself with Russian nationalism increased over the decadesleading up to the First World War. Nonetheless, for much of its history, the tsaristregime retained an ambivalent attitude toward the concept of a Russian nation-state; to its last days, the way in which the empire functioned continued to reflectits multiethnic character.33

The Russian empire was the product of a gradual process of territorial acqui-sition that had taken place over the course of five centuries. Its originalgeopolitical core was the Muscovite state that had assumed control over mostRussian-speaking areas by the sixteenth century, and thereafter expandedsteadily into non-Russian regions. Beginning with Ivan the Terrible’s conquest ofthe Tatar khanate of Kazan in 1552, and then again after the rise of theRomanov dynasty in the seventeenth century, Russia pushed its borders outwardsin a seemingly endless series of full-scale wars and low-grade conflicts that weremotivated by a combination of security considerations, economic interests, and asense of Russia’s religious mission as would-be heir to the Byzantine empire’srole as upholder of the Orthodox Christian faith. By the mid-to-late nineteenthcentury, Russia controlled an expanse of territory stretching from Finland in thenorth, to Poland in the west, to Transcaucasia and Central Asia in the south, andthe Pacific coast in the Far East.

Unlike the Habsburg empire, the Russian empire was largely the product ofmilitary conquest rather than dynastic marriage. From the start, therefore, thetsars and ruling elite were able to treat their territories as parts of a single,


semi-centralized state, rather than as distinct polities brought together inpersonal union.34 Russia was thought of by its rulers as a patrimonial state – thatis, its lands, peoples, and resources were, in theory, possessions that were passedon from each tsar or tsarina to his or her heir.35

The concept of the patrimonial state was challenged and somewhat erodedby eighteenth-century Enlightenment notions about the rule of law, and nine-teenth-century nationalist ideas about the land as patrimony of the Russianpeople. However camouflaged or overladen with other constructs, though, theidea of the patrimonial state remained a molding force in tsarist policy to thevery end of the regime in 1917. Russian nationalism (closely associated withRussian Orthodoxy) was used to reinforce the tsars’ political hegemony and toenhance the cohesion of the state, but it never quite became the state’s raisond’être. It was certainly the tsars’ consistent assumption that the ethnically non-Russian areas of the empire were as integral a part of their domain as was theold Muscovite heartland. Russification was one obvious way in which to try andintegrate those territories into the tsarist realm, but the ideas of dynastic rightand aristocratic privilege that remained at the core of the ruling elite’s politicalculture could not be fully reconciled with Russian nationalism. In the final anal-ysis, the tsarist regime was neither willing to embrace cultural diversity nor toidentify itself unequivocally as an embodiment of Russian popular will.36

In practice, of course, the exercise of power over such vast territories andvaried populations necessarily involved de facto negotiation and tacit compromiseswith various social groups. In its relations with the ethnic groups that cameunder its control, the Russian government was often willing to make pragmaticconcessions in order to ease the task of integrating newly acquired territoriesinto the state. For example, the Muslims of Central Asia remained exempt frommilitary conscription until 1916. Non-Russian ethnic elites who converted toRussian Orthodoxy (or who were Russian Orthodox to begin with) were inte-grated into the Russian aristocracy. But even when they refused to convert, thesocial elites of conquered peoples were often allowed to retain some of theirtraditional privileges and powers, so as to win their allegiance to the tsar. Wherepragmatic considerations of this sort came into conflict with the missionaryactivity of the Church, the former generally took precedence. Thus, Peter theGreat’s early-eighteenth-century attempt to convert the Tatar nobles from Islamto Christian Orthodoxy on pain of losing their aristocratic status was reversedseveral decades later by Catherine the Great, who recognized that the policy hadonly served to antagonize an important social stratum rather than integrating itinto the state’s official culture. In instances where missionary activity could bepursued without provoking serious resistance (for instance, among the animisticpeoples of Siberia), it was undertaken with greater consistency.37

It is also noteworthy that Russians as a whole were not the most educated orwealthy ethnic group of the empire. Although Russians did predominate in theofficer corps and the bureaucratic elite, most Russians were dirt-poor, illiteratepeasants, half of whom were serfs who were not liberated until 1861, and whocontinued thereafter to be encumbered by laws restricting their freedom of


movement. The fact that they spoke Russian did not give them any advantageover peasants who spoke Estonian or Ukrainian or Georgian. Indeed, whilemany Russian serfs had belonged to non-Russian landlords, Tatars could notbecome enserfed to members of the Russian nobility. Overall, the conditions forRussian peasants were probably worse than those for most of their non-Russiancounterparts.

It was in the northwestern and western sections of the empire that the mosteducated and economically successful ethnic groups were to be found. In theseregions, there was often a significant correlation between ethnicity and class, aphenomenon that was reinforced by the state’s inclination to co-opt social elites.Thus, the German elite that had ruled part of the Baltic lands since the region’sconquest by the Teutonic Knights in the Middle Ages retained its hegemony overthe Latvian and Estonian peasantry, as did the landowning gentry of the formerPolish kingdom over the Ukrainians and Belorussians who tilled their fields.Indeed, for many years (until the state’s late-nineteenth-century Russificationcampaign), many of these regional ruling classes were free to pursue their ownpolicies of cultural assimilation (i.e. Germanization, Polonization) toward thegenerally illiterate ethnic groups under their control. It was also in the Balticprovinces and parts of Poland that late-nineteenth-century industrializationdeveloped most extensively (along with Moscow and St. Petersburg, but incontrast to most of the ethnically Russian provinces).

Although Russians dominated the highest levels of government, educatednon-Russians such as Germans and Poles did fulfill important functions in boththe regional and central administration of the state, while members of diasporanationalities such as the Armenians, Jews, and Tatars (as well as many ethnicGermans) played vital roles in building and maintaining the commercial andfinancial networks that sustained the economy. For much of its history, then, theRussian empire effectively functioned as a multinational state, in which thenarrow upper stratum of ethnic Russians controlled political and military power,but in which a number of other nationalities attained higher overall standards ofliving and education, and filled vital economic and administrative niches.38 TheRussian state was conceived of as a territorial/administrative/dynastic unitencompassing many different nationalities and transcending all of them. In someways, the Russian-speaking population was but one of those subject peoples.This distinction was even expressed linguistically, in a manner which is lost in thetranslation: rossiiskii (Russian) was the adjective applied to the empire as a whole,while russkii (Russian) was used when referring specifically to the Russianlanguage, culture or people.39

It was not until the nineteenth century that the tendency to conflate the mean-ings of rossiiskii and russkii became part of a concerted policy. The Russificationpolicy that was pursued with varying degrees of zeal during the latter part of thecentury was part of an attempt to reinforce the legitimacy and consolidate thesocio-cultural hegemony of the tsarist autocracy during a period of rapid socialand economic change. The Russification campaign was designed to helpmodernize and consolidate the state bureaucracy by establishing a uniform


language of administration throughout the empire’s far-flung territories.40 It wasalso designed as a repressive and/or preemptive measure directed against certainrebellious ethnic groups (notably the Poles after the crushing of their 1863uprising). At the same time, pan-Slavism – the idea that all Slavic peoples shouldunite under the aegis of the mighty Russian state – gained influence among intel-lectual circles as well as certain segments of the diplomatic and militaryestablishments. Its effect was particularly noticeable in Russia’s aggressive Balkanpolicy of the 1870s and 1880s.41

It is important to bear in mind that the regime’s linguistic policies were notuniform, nor were they applied consistently in all times and places. In thewestern provinces – predominantly East Slavic regions that had come to beviewed as a zone of contestation between Polish and Russian cultural influences– Russification was, for a time, pursued with missionary zeal. Attempts by theUkrainian and Belorussian intelligentsias to revive or develop high cultures basedon their own languages were perceived, mistakenly, as part of a Polish plot todraw the local peasantry away from its supposedly Russian roots.42 Instructionand publication in Ukrainian and Belorussian were accordingly forbidden andthe 1839 ban on the Uniate Church of Belorussia and western Ukraine wasenforced, all with a view to integrating these regions’ Slavic population into theGreat Russian mainstream.

In the cases of ethnic groups whose languages were more firmly linked to awell-established high culture, Russification was pursued more sporadically andinconsistently. In Poland, attempts to impose Russian as the language of instruc-tion in the school system were effectively abandoned in the face of widespreadresistance, although higher education in Poland remained a Russian-languagepreserve until the First World War. In the parts of the Baltic provinces roughlycorresponding to present-day Latvia and Estonia, the local German landowningaristocracy was regarded as a loyal elite that played a useful role in administeringthe region and in maintaining social order and the authority of the state(although the spread of German nationalism, especially among the non-aristo-cratic German urban population in the region, was a source of growingconcern). In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the tsarist regime’sincreasing ambition to exercise direct control in all regions led it to imposeRussian as the official administrative, judicial, and educational language in theBaltic provinces and to undercut the ethnic Germans’ local dominance byencouraging upward social mobility among the Estonian and Latvian peasantry.But the violent rural unrest that broke out in this region during the 1905Revolution induced the Russian government to revert to its traditional alliancewith the Baltic German barons. In Finland, the loyalty of the Swedish elite tothe tsar was suspect, but rather than trying to Russify this semi-autonomousregion, the regime fostered the development of Finnish as a literary and officiallanguage in order to offset Swedish influence. By the turn of the century, Finnishnational consciousness was itself considered too far advanced, and many of thepowers of the Finnish Diet were accordingly circumscribed by Nicholas II.43

Various nationalities were regarded as intrinsically unassimilable or even


undesirable; rather than seeking to integrate them into Russian society, the stateinstitutionalized their marginalization. Little or no effort was made to Russify theMuslim peoples of Central Asia, whose recently conquered lands were covetedas prime areas for colonization by the surplus peasant population of the Slavicheartland. The rebellious Circassians of the western Caucasus were simplydriven from their homes and forced to flee to the Ottoman empire. The Jews –who had experienced a short-lived easing of restrictions in the 1860s – weresubjected to renewed repression in the 1880s and left unprotected against violentpogroms.44

These complex and inconsistent policies reflected the dilemmas faced by aregime hoping to bring the society and government of a multiethnic empiretogether as part of an organically unified polity under the auspices of a rigidlyauthoritarian system of government. Some Slavic and/or Eastern Orthodoxgroups were defined as integral parts of the body politic, vital limbs that neededto be more intimately connected to the Great Russian trunk. Other peoples weredesignated as alien and unclean elements (in the social-hygiene imagery that wasincreasingly favored in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European polit-ical discourse)45 and were accordingly targeted for persecution, exploitation, andmarginalization. The contradictions inherent in these awkward and heavy-handed attempts at political modernization were never fully acknowledged orexamined within the ruling circles.

The Russification campaign achieved some degree of success in certain areas(particularly among the population of Belorussia and eastern Ukraine). Overall,though, the regime’s ham-fisted methods only alienated non-Russian ethnicgroups and stimulated the inception of nationalist movements by their elites. Bythe same token, the development of a distinctively Russian national conscious-ness did not necessarily go hand in hand with increased popular support for thetsarist regime; it could just as readily be turned against a government whoseinconsistent policies and erratic behavior did not always seem to coincide withany identifiable national interest of the Russian people. During the First WorldWar, the tsarist regime’s reluctance to encourage spontaneous contributions bycivic organizations and regional bodies to the war effort was perceived as areflection of its ambivalence toward the potentially democratic-egalitarian ideaof Russian nationalism. Nagging suspicions over the tsar’s true loyalties wereaggravated by the appointment of Boris Stürmer, a reactionary thought to bepro-German, to head the cabinet in the midst of the war and by the undue influ-ence over the tsarina exercised by the Siberian mystic, Grigorii Rasputin – aknown advocate of immediate peace talks. Amidst the devastating militarysetbacks and economic upheaval of the First World War, this growing gulfbetween Russian nationalist sentiment and the tsarist regime contributed signifi-cantly to the revolution of March 1917.46

Political agendas, cultural orientations, and social-mobilization patternsamong ethnic groups in the Russian empire were extremely varied, but some ofthe major typologies would have seemed quite familiar to observers of theHabsburg scene. There was, most notably, a contrast between nationalities whose


nobilities regarded themselves as guardians of historic state traditions, and ethnicgroups that consisted almost exclusively of impoverished peasants with littlecollective sense of connection to political history. With the passage of time, thiscontrast became somewhat blurred as the leaders of “historic” nations turned tothe masses for support, while the intellectual elites that arose among the “non-historic” peoples compensated for the difficulty of mobilizing illiterate peasantsby indulging in intoxicating fantasies about glorious national histories of theirown invention.

The Polish nationalism that manifested itself in the futile revolts of 1830 and1863 was very much a gentry-led affair, although the failure of those uprisingscalled into question both the wisdom of armed rebellion and the value of gentryleadership. During the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the Polish intelli-gentsia, gentry, and growing middle class steered clear of romantic adventurism,focussing on economic development and material progress as the most importantvehicles for national self-advancement. Cities such as Warsaw and ¸ódz did infact become major industrial centers, and the development of urban society ledto the creation of mass-based Polish nationalist movements around the turn ofthe century.

Among predominantly peasant peoples such as the Ukrainians, Lithuanians,and Belorussians, the development of national consciousness was a much slower,more uncertain affair. Ukrainian nationalists saw themselves as reviving thelegacy of the Cossack Hetmanate,47 and Lithuanians identified themselves withthe medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania.48 These attempts to anchor nationalconsciousness in historic state traditions made up in enthusiasm for what theylacked in conviction: unlike Poland, whose vestigial autonomy had been recog-nized by the tsarist government as late as 1863 and whose old ruling classremained a prominent social elite, the last substantive manifestations of theHetmanate and the Grand Duchy had long since disappeared.49 The tinyhandful of intellectuals who committed themselves to the assertion of a distinc-tive Belorussian cultural and national identity were even more hard pressed touncover a distinctive political history for their people.50

Ironically, it was precisely the tsarist regime’s campaign against Polish culturalhegemony in the Ukraine, Belorussia, and Lithuania that spurred efforts by theindigenous intelligentsias in these regions to develop literary languages andeducational systems based on the idioms of the common folk. The subsequentban by the Russian authorities on publishing and teaching in these languageshad mixed results, both hampering the diffusion of national consciousnessamong the masses and radicalizing the attitudes of the activists. In the case ofthe Ukrainians and Lithuanians, ethnic enclaves across the border (in AustrianGalicia and German East Prussia, respectively) served as bases for the publica-tion of native-language materials that were smuggled into Russia. The Austrianand German authorities were quite willing to encourage dissension among theRussian empire’s subject peoples.

Variations on these themes were played out across the length and breadth ofthe Russian empire. The development of Estonian and Latvian literary


languages was actually pioneered by scholars from among the local Baltic-German elite, who took an ethnographic interest in the indigenous languages, asdid Swedish intellectuals in the Finnish tongue. These regions’ Lutheran culturecombined with the growth of a freeholding peasantry to produce relatively highliteracy rates in the nineteenth century. This created fertile soil in which to sowthe seeds of national cultures.51 Among the Latvians and Estonians, nationalistemotions were directed first and foremost against the continued socio-politicalhegemony of the Baltic-German barons.52

Among the Jews, disappointment over the rollback of mid-nineteenth-centuryreforms, and desperation over the unleashing of pogroms against their commu-nities from 1881 on, led to a high degree of political activism, both clandestineand open. Among the wide variety of movements that took root among theJewish masses around the turn of the century was the Bund (the Yiddish wordfor “Union”) – a Marxist movement popular among the Jewish workers ofPoland’s industrial towns. The Bund used Yiddish – the language of the masses –as its preferred medium of communication, and claimed the exclusive right torepresent the interests of the Jewish working class within the framework of theRussian socialist movement. The Zionists, for their part, upheld Hebrew as theauthentic and original language that must be cultivated in preparation for massmigration to the Jewish homeland of Palestine. The Russian authorities were, attimes, inclined to tolerate the activities of the Zionists insofar as they promotedthe departure of Jews from the Russian empire, although their organizationsremained officially illegal. The Bundists were regarded as more dangerous, sincethey sought to promote an autonomous Jewish working-class culture withinRussia while collaborating with other socialists in a common effort to overthrowthe regime.53

In Transcaucasia, the Armenians were marked by an exceptionally strongsense of collective history and destiny, a distinctive identity that was enshrined inthe traditions of their ancient Church54 and reinforced by a sense of solidaritywith the Armenians across the border in the Ottoman empire. Though they didnot have their own nobility (aside from the landowning gentry of the district ofNagorno-Karabakh), Armenians were a prominent element among theburgeoning commercial and industrial elites in the major cities of Transcaucasia,from Batum on the Black Sea to Baku on the Caspian. The development of theoil industry in Baku also brought into being a relatively large and politicallyactive Armenian working class. The dynamism of this relatively cosmopolitanethnic group and its high visibility in the region’s urban centers earned it thehostility of other Transcaucasian ethnic groups such as Georgians andAzerbaijanis, whose overwhelmingly rural background left them ill-equipped tocompete effectively in the hurly-burly of a rapidly industrializing economy.55

The Muslim population of the empire formed a complex cultural and socio-economic mosaic which did not readily arrange itself into cut-and-driedcategories of ethnic identity and nationhood. In principle, the Islamic commu-nity of the faithful was conceived of as transcending (both spiritually andpolitically) the divisions of class, ethnicity, geography. In practice, a broad variety


of historical experiences, cultural orientations, and regional issues shaped theidentities of Muslims in the tsarist empire. In Transcaucasia, as we have seen,conflict with the Christian Armenians played a decisive role in the developmentof the Azerbaijanis’ political consciousness. The Muslim peoples of theCaucasus mountains spoke a bewilderingly diverse array of tongues, and theirgeographic fragmentation was reinforced by the politics of the clan and theblood feud. They did, however, share a common resentment of tsarist politicaldominance (imposed following the Ottoman empire’s forced withdrawal fromthe region in 1774) and of Russian settlers. In the mid-nineteenth century, theideal of the Islamic community and the solidarist ethos of the Sufi brotherhoodhad been successfully transposed to the politics of resistance by the Avar leaderImam Shamil, who was able to bring together a formidable array of Chechenand Daghestani fighters in an anti-Russian rebellion that held out against over-whelming odds for many years.56

Most of Muslim Central Asia was formally incorporated into the Russianempire over the course of the nineteenth century, and the khanates of Bukharaand Khiva actually retained their formal sovereignty as Russian protectoratesuntil after the Bolshevik Revolution. Russia’s late acquisition of these regions,and its temporal coincidence with the nineteenth-century wave of Europeanoverseas imperial expansion, served to accentuate the essentially colonial statusof the new territories. To the south, in fertile Turkestan, the cultivation of cottonas a cash crop was virtually imposed on the indigenous peasantry. Both financingof production and purchase of the crop were handled by monopolistic Russiancommercial interests on a grossly exploitative basis that created an ever-growingclass of landless peasants, while a narrow stratum of indigenous middlemenearned large profits.

The highly stratified structure of these societies and the relatively parochialoutlook of their ruling classes rendered them particularly vulnerable to Russiandivide-and-rule tactics. The traditional socio-political elites were easily co-optedby the Russian authorities – most notably in the case of Bukhara, a culturalcenter with enormous regional prestige, whose emir actually relied on Russianassistance to help him reassert control over the rebellious, eastern, Shi’ite regionsof his khanate. The clerical/scholarly class (the ulama’ ) was usually willing topromote political docility among the general populace as long as its own socialauthority and control over educational institutions and religious endowments(waqfs) was not intruded upon or challenged. The fact that Arabic was theMuslims’ sole liturgical language and Farsi generally the preferred medium ofliterary expression and official communication among the Central Asian elites,while a variety of Turkic dialects were employed in everyday speech by themasses, made it particularly difficult for would-be political activists to constructsharply delineated cultural and geographical frameworks of national identity oreven to agree upon common idioms for the dissemination of their ideas. TheCentral Asian peasant revolts that broke out sporadically during the last decadesof the nineteenth century tended to be fairly spontaneous affairs with little


support among the established or educated classes, and were snuffed out withrelative ease by the Russian military authorities.

Finally, the Tatars (speakers of a Turkic tongue) of the Volga region had livedin close proximity to Russians for centuries and had been under Russian rulesince Ivan the Terrible’s conquest of Kazan in 1552. Culturally and economi-cally, they were the Muslim group that had adapted most successfully to lifeunder the tsars; indeed, their commercial and industrial elite played a highlyvisible role in the empire’s modernization efforts. The Tatar intelligentsia’s rela-tively intimate familiarity with the Russian language and culture gave itimmediate access to the latest ideological currents shaking up Russian intellec-tual circles. The influence of Russian populism and pan-Slavism stimulatedTatar intellectuals to think in new ways about their own identity and about theirrelationship with other Muslim and Turkic peoples, both within the Russianempire and outside it. By the turn of the century, Tatar intellectuals and theirpublications were playing a prominent role in disseminating novel socio-politicalideas among the nascent intelligentsias of Azerbaijan and Central Asia – andeven the Ottoman empire (see Chapter 3).

The 1905 Revolution and the short period of liberalization that came in itswake served to intensify ideological fermentation and heighten politicalconsciousness among Russians and non-Russians alike. The brief lifting ofcensorship led to a flourishing of publications of every imaginable politicalorientation and in every major language. The creation of a parliament (Duma)provided a forum for public debate and an opportunity for extensive cross-fertilization of ideas among the social and intellectual elites of different ethnicand regional groups. The re-imposition of censorship and the limitations onvoting rights that soon followed could not force all these genies back into theirbottles. Yet it should also be stressed that most nationalist elites in the Russianempire did not seriously contemplate outright political separatism; talk ofcultural autonomy and the possible reconfiguration of the state along federallines was the norm. Furthermore, while mass movements were clearly emergingamong the empire’s most urbanized and industrialized peoples, such as the Poles,in most regions political nationalism was still confined to relatively narrow intel-lectual circles as of 1914.

While the tsarist regime looked askance upon the autonomist or separatistaspirations of ethnic groups within its own borders, it did not hesitate toencourage nationalism in areas impinging on the interests of rival powers.Conservative, pan-Slavic elements among the Galician Ukrainian intelligentsiacultivated close contact with sympathetic officials on the Russian side of theborder, as did similar groups among the Habsburg empire’s other Slavic nation-alities. More significantly, during the last years before the outbreak of war,irredentist politicians and officers in Serbia were convinced they enjoyed Russia’stacit support in their ongoing campaign of propaganda and terrorism directedagainst the Austro-Hungarian authorities in Bosnia. Of course, the shots thatwere fired at Sarajevo in June 1914 were ultimately to strike down the tsaristsystem as well as the Habsburg monarchy.57


The Ottoman Empire

Among the three empires examined here, the Ottoman can be said to havebeen ruled by the most cosmopolitan elite. Whereas the Romanov dynastyflirted with Russian nationalism and pan-Slavism, and the Habsburg emperorwas unmistakably Austro-German in culture, the Ottoman ruling family andadministrative elite before 1908 could only vaguely and imprecisely bedescribed as Turkish. True, the Ottoman dynasty (named after its founder,Osman I, 1280–1324) traced its origins to a clan of Turkic warrior-nomadswhose thirteenth-century military advances against the Byzantine empire placedthem in a strong position to replace the declining Seljuk Turks as the majorMuslim power in Anatolia. The Ottomans went on to seize the Balkans in thefifteenth century, Constantinople58 – the last stronghold of the Byzantineempire – in 1453, and the Middle East in the sixteenth century. But by thistime, the Ottoman rulers had long since shifted their regime’s center of gravityfrom the saddle to the throne. As Sultans of the Ottoman empire, they drewheavily on Byzantine administrative practices and upheld orthodox Sunni Islam– rather than the mystic sects popular among Turkic horsemen – as the officialstate religion. Their political culture was molded by the legacy of classicalIslamic civilization. Thousands of Arabic and Farsi words were incorporatedinto Ottoman speech and writing. The Ottoman language that emerged as themedium of imperial high culture was a mixture of vocabularies, grammaticalforms, and stylistic devices that was not strictly identifiable as the vernacular ofany given ethnic group (although its basic structure remained recognizablyTurkic).59

Like the other two states we have surveyed, the Ottoman empire contained ahighly varied mix of ethnic and religious groups, even after losing control ofmost of its remaining Balkan territories in 1912–1913.60 The Sunni Muslims,who constituted a majority of the empire’s population, included most of theTurkish speakers of western and central Anatolia and of the empire’s remainingBalkan territory around Istanbul and Edirne (Adrianople), many of the Kurds ofeastern Anatolia and northern Syria and Mesopotamia, and most of the Arabsto the south. Interspersed among, or adjacent to, these predominantly SunniMuslim populations were various heterodox and non-Muslim groups such as theAlawites of northwestern Syria, the Shiites of southern Mesopotamia, the GreekOrthodox, Greek Catholics, and Maronite Christians of Syria–Palestine and Mt.Lebanon, the Armenians concentrated in northeastern Anatolia and in citiesthroughout the region, the ethnic Greeks of the western Anatolian coastline, andthe Jewish communities of Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Palestine.

Even more so than in the case of the Russian empire, the Ottoman statecannot be said to have been of particular material benefit to what wascommonly regarded as its dominant ethnic group. The Turkish-speaking regionswere actually more heavily taxed than others, and while the empire’s administra-tive and military elite included a disproportionate number of Turks, ittraditionally included many members of other nationalities as well. TheOttoman state’s central legitimizing principle was its claim to be the expression


and protector of the unity of the Sunni Muslims of the world as a community offaith, or umma. Being a Sunni Muslim male, cultivating the right social connec-tions, and assimilating into Ottoman culture, rather than belonging to anyparticular ethnic group, were the necessary conditions for achieving upwardmobility in the governing apparatus. At the same time, members of non-Muslimcommunities, such as Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, played key roles in the devel-opment of the state’s commercial and financial infrastructure.61

Although in principle the Sultan’s authority was absolute, by the early nine-teenth century he was, in practice, heavily dependent on the support of thesemi-feudal landed aristocracy, the Islamic clergy, and the independent-minded“slave” soldiers known as janissaries (who had become more proficient in the artof the palace coup than the battlefield victory). In the absence of a professionalimperial bureaucracy, many outlying provinces, such as those in the Arab MiddleEast, were allowed a considerable measure of autonomy as long as their rulingelites were willing and able to collect revenue and military manpower on theSultan’s behalf.

The empire’s Christians and Jews were regarded as infidels but were alsorecognized as people of the Book (as distinct from pagans). Their longstandingstatus as dhimmis designated them as members of juridically inferior, butprotected, communities that were subject to special legal provisions and obliga-tions (such as special tax payments), although full citizenship was formallygranted to non-Muslims in 1839. The various non-Muslim religious denomina-tions were organized into millets – self-regulating communities defined, notterritorially, but in terms of affiliation with a set of religious institutions. Theclerical authorities of any given millet functioned as its internal leadership, and itwas, traditionally, through these authorities that Ottoman power was mediated.62

This arrangement had originally functioned quite effectively as a system of co-optation and control, with the heads of the various millets being held accountablefor their respective communities’ tax obligations, military-conscription quotas,etc. By the nineteenth century, however, the empire’s corporate structuring ofpower, of which the millets were a prominent manifestation, had become a markof its weakness and inefficiency in comparison to the much more streamlinedEuropean polities.

Indeed, the Ottoman empire – once the terror of Europe – had been steadilydeclining in relative power for centuries. While much of Europe underwent theeconomic, technological, administrative, and political revolutions commonlyreferred to as modernization, the once mighty Ottoman empire seemed to stag-nate amidst pervasive corruption and half-hearted reforms. Its ultimate collapsewas deemed inevitable by most European observers. This was a prospect thatwas contemplated with varying combinations of eagerness and apprehensivenessby the rapacious Great Powers, each of which was concerned with maximizingits political and economic influence in the Middle East while minimizing that ofits rivals. Although this rivalry gave the Ottomans an opportunity to stave offdomination by any one power by playing the imperial competitors off againstone another, the relationship between the Ottoman empire and the major


European states was a manifestly unequal one. The so-called Capitulationsenshrined this inequality in law by providing extraterritorial legal status –amounting to diplomatic immunity – to all Europeans traveling or doing busi-ness in the Sultan’s territories, with no hint of reciprocity. By the nineteenthcentury, the growing exploitation and abuse of the Capitulations flagrantlyviolated contemporaneous European ideas about the sacrosanct quality of statesovereignty.

The inferior status and intermittent persecution of Christian communities inthe empire drew the attention of Western public opinion and created opportuni-ties for European intervention in the affairs of the Ottoman state. The Russians,in particular, consistently sought to present themselves as protectors of theempire’s Eastern Orthodox communities. The reform plans that Europeandiplomatic conferences regularly sought to impose on the Ottoman empiretended to call for an enhancement of the millets’ autonomy, and even thegranting of territorial self-rule to individual millets. During the nineteenthcentury, this approach had led to the gradual disintegration of Ottoman controlover Balkan territories such as Serbia and Bulgaria, where members ofOrthodox Christian millets constituted a majority of the population. One of theprovisions agreed upon at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 was a Great Powerguarantee of administrative reform in the six Armenian-populated provinces ofnortheastern Anatolia (across the border from Russia). Although never enforced,this unfulfilled promise served as a juridical principle in the name of whichArmenian nationalist organizations appealed to European governments andpublic opinion for support. Tensions over the Armenian question spiraledincreasingly out of control from the 1890s on, as Armenian activists carried outspectacular paramilitary and terrorist operations against the Ottoman govern-ment while the Sultan’s regime incited, or turned a blind eye to, the wholesalemassacres of Armenian communities in the heart of Istanbul as well as ineastern Anatolia.63

As the Ottoman state lost ever more territory in the Balkans, and as theSultan’s nominal authority in North Africa was openly flouted by Europeanimperial powers, the Ottomans struggled to consolidate control over what wasleft of their once mighty empire. Beginning in 1839, they initiated a series ofreforms referred to collectively as the Tanzimat (short for Tanzimat-i Hayriye –“Beneficent Reorderings”). This modernization effort led to the creation of alarge government bureaucracy and a professional officer corps, closer supervi-sion of the provinces by the new bureaucracy, the systematic registration of landownership throughout the empire with a view to more efficient revenue collec-tion, and an incipient trend away from Islamic law (shariat) and toward a moresecularized judicial system. Diplomats and top administrators were either sent toWestern Europe for their education, or were trained at new institutions of higherand professional education that were established in Istanbul. Most notableamong these were the Royal Medical Academy, the Civil Service Academy (theMülkiye), and the War Academy (the Harbiye).

In many respects, however, the reforms fell far short of the mark, raising


expectations that could not be fulfilled. Indeed, one of the most significant side-effects of the Tanzimat was the creation of new, semi-Westernized professionalelites who were eager to pursue the reforms to their logical conclusions and werefrustrated by the seeming inability or unwillingness of the regime to surmountthe many social, cultural, and institutional obstacles that stood in the way of acomplete remaking of the Ottoman state. The regime’s profound ambivalenceabout the whole modernization process was encapsulated by SultanAbdülhamit’s response to the Eastern Crisis of 1875–1878. In the face of revoltsagainst Ottoman authority in the Balkans, and in an attempt to ward off theimposition of reforms on the Ottoman empire by the European powers, theSultan issued a constitution granting equality under the law to all subjectsregardless of their faith and creating an elected parliament. But less than a yearlater (in 1877), he suspended the Constitution and returned to autocratic rule.For the following three decades, the Demand for a restoration of theConstitution of 1876 was to be the common rallying cry of a wide range ofpolitical dissidents, many of them graduates of the empire’s new educationalinstitutions and members of its new socio-political elites.

The economic development that the reforms were supposed to facilitate wasslow to come, and uneven in its social impact. While initiatives by foreigninvestors led to the undertaking of high-visibility projects such as the construc-tion of the “Berlin–Baghdad” railway, the general infrastructure of the economyremained pre-industrial. The penetration of Middle Eastern markets byWestern-manufactured products benefited small groups of middlemen whileundermining the livelihood of local craftsmen. The most successful indigenousintermediaries in international commercial and financial transactions tended tobe members of Christian minorities, whose Western cultural orientation(commonly reinforced by education in the French-run schools that were estab-lished throughout the Middle East during the nineteenth century) and diasporaconnections (in the case of Greeks and Armenians) made them natural candi-dates for such roles. A number of Jewish families also rose to prominence in thisfashion. Of course, this pattern reinforced Muslim resentment of the minoritiesin their midst. Social and economic inequalities within Muslim populations wereaggravated by the program of land-ownership registration undertaken in thecontext of the Tanzimat. It was the wealthiest and most influential Muslimlandowners and merchants who dominated the local judicial bodies responsiblefor issuing titles, while the lower strata lacked the education and financialresources needed to make good their claims. The result was a pattern of dispos-session of poor peasants, who were forced to become either tenant farmers orlandless laborers, while the landed elites consolidated their economic dominanceand used their financial power to purchase public office, further strengtheningtheir grip on the regional branches of the expanding state bureaucracy.64

For the empire’s non-Muslim peoples, the Tanzimat were laden with contradic-tory and paradoxical implications. On the one hand, the regime’s efforts toweaken the independent power of the clergy had extended to some of the reli-gious minorities, where it had led to the creation of more secular andrepresentative communal bodies that further institutionalized the millets’


autonomy. On the other hand, the long-term goal of the Tanzimat seemed to bethe creation of a more integrated and unified body politic, and the uniformdistribution of state power across regions and populations in accordance withmodern, European conceptions of political sovereignty. This could be a double-edged sword, bringing a theoretical equality to oppressed ethno-religious groupswhile in effect subjecting them more directly to the authority of an often brutaland arbitrary government. In general, the half-baked nature of the reform effortcreated enormous disquiet and uncertainty about the future status of the millets,and it clearly contributed to the unrest among the Armenian population inparticular.

Finally, it must be noted that during the last decades of the nineteenthcentury, the Ottoman Sultans laid new emphasis on their claim to be heirs to theclassical Islamic Caliphate. As Caliph, the Sultan claimed both spiritual andpolitical authority, not only within the empire, but in principle over all membersof the umma beyond its borders as well. The Sultan’s role as Caliph was high-lighted in pan-Islamic propaganda that was disseminated as far afield as RussianCentral Asia. By focussing attention on their role as caliphs, the sultans werestressing the intimate connection between the spiritual unity of the umma and thepolitical integrity of the empire and trying to create an ideological framework forthe state’s return to a Great Power role. Yet this pan-Islamic theme ran contraryto the modernizing spirit of the Tanzimat and undermined the politically integra-tive goals of the reform effort as well by drawing attention to the anomalousposition of the Ottomans’ non-Muslim subjects. In a very loose sense, theOttomans’ pan-Islamic propaganda campaign can be seen as analogous to thetsars’ efforts to identify themselves more closely with the idea of Russian nation-alism and pan-Slavism. In both cases, imperial regimes were searching for waysof establishing stronger emotional and psychological grips over their subjects,but in appealing to the identity of one community (or group of communities)they ran the risk of alienating everyone else.

Indeed, the nineteenth century witnessed the rise of a particularly strongsense of nationalist or proto-nationalist identity among a number of the empire’sChristian peoples. The Orthodox Christian tradition of native liturgies, rein-forced perhaps by the institutional precedent of the millet system, lent itselfreadily to the creation of religious frameworks for nation-making, as one branchafter another of the Orthodox Church in the Balkans (Serbian Orthodox,Bulgarian Orthodox, etc.) claimed autonomous status within the framework ofEastern Orthodoxy. Indeed, this close association of ethnicity with religion maywell have contributed to the fervor and intransigence of Balkan nationalisms; itis interesting to note that forced conversion was a favored method of “inte-grating” the population of newly acquired territories during the Balkan Wars of1912–1913.65

For its part, as the empire’s official religion, Sunni Islam was not structurallylinked to any particular regional or ethnic identity, making it difficult for would-be nationalists among the Muslim peoples to reconcile their ideas with religiousprinciples.66 The sense of humiliation born of the Ottoman empire’s relative


decline, combined with frustration over the government’s failure to followthrough effectively on reform initiatives, did stimulate the growth of a militantreform movement – The Committee of Union and Progress, also known as theYoung Turks – among the empire’s administrative and military elites. As we shallsee in the next chapter, the evolution of this movement highlighted the tensionbetween Islamic universalism and the ethnic particularism that was beginning togain ground among the Muslim intelligentsias during the last years before theFirst World War.

Epilogue

In discussing the enormous challenges and dizzying complexities with whicheach of these multinational empires had to contend, it is difficult to avoidcreating the impression that they were descending very rapidly toward totalcollapse and disintegration. It is therefore worth pointing out that all threeregimes were still very much going concerns as of 1914; in fact, their resiliencein the face of total warfare down to 1917 or 1918 is quite remarkable. Indeed,before the war, most nationalist organizations in the Habsburg, Russian, andOttoman empires did not explicitly seek outright independence; they focussedinstead on advancing various plans for cultural and political autonomy andsocial reform.

Furthermore, before 1914, it was not clear what political configurationswould replace the empires if they ever did reach a point of total collapse. Manyof the nationalist movements mentioned here were still in an embryonic phase ofdevelopment as of 1914; even among those that could already be described asmass movements, there were deep internal divisions over tactics, strategies, andthe definition of long-term objectives. The war was to play a decisive role inshaping the evolution of nationalist movements by suddenly and dramaticallyexposing both the brutality and the fragility of the imperial states, by wreakinghavoc upon millions of people who had hitherto remained on the margins ofpolitical life and who now found they could not escape politics, and by creatingunusual leadership opportunities for certain figures who might not otherwisehave risen to prominence. Yet this powerful, across-the-board impact assumedhighly differentiated forms among the various intellectual strands and socialsectors of each “nation.” While the war did create a sudden opportunity for thebirth of new states, it did not automatically endow their citizenries with homoge-neous collective identities or uniform sets of socio-political expectations. In mostinstances, it merely created temporary illusions of national unity – and thereinlay the peril.

However, before we can explore the impact of the war on nationalist move-ments, we must take a closer look at the ideological impulses that animated thenationalist intelligentsias that dominated (or even constituted) those movementson the eve of the war.


At the onset of the First World War, the prospect of national self-determinationfor the subject peoples of the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires seemedquite remote. Though facing severe domestic and foreign challenges, theseempires were not only still intact, but seemed downright vigorous in manyrespects. The Habsburg empire had just expanded its territory by formally incor-porating the province of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908. (It had assumed de factocontrol there in 1878.) For its part, the Ottoman empire was undergoing anambitious political-reform and administrative-modernization effort under theaegis of the Young Turks, who had consolidated their grip on power followingOttoman military defeats in North Africa and the Balkans that discredited rivalelites. Russia’s humiliation at the hands of the Japanese in the war of 1904–1905had only reinforced its ruling elite’s zeal for an ever faster pace of industrializa-tion and military modernization, while turning its foreign ambitions away fromthe Far East and back toward the intricacies of Balkan politics.

Many of the nationalist movements that were to challenge these imperialcolossi were little more than fledglings in 1914 in terms of continuous organiza-tional history. Some of them felt ideologically and emotionally linked to acentury or more of sporadic uprisings and periodic martyrdoms. There hadbeen Polish revolts against tsarist rule in 1830 and 1863, and the Habsburgempire had been rent by nationalist turmoil during the 1848–1849 revolutions.Yet there was little organic continuity between the leadership of these past rebel-lions and the nationalist political groupings that emerged onto the political stagearound the turn of the century. Some of these movements had begun to garnerextensive popular support during the few years since their founding. Othersremained almost exclusively elite formations. The overwhelming majority wereled by intellectuals and members of the wider intelligentsia – that is, educatedprofessionals who were directly exposed to the ideas of intellectuals and whoaspired to implement them. In many cases, these were the people most likely tofeel alienated, discriminated against, and limited in their opportunities forupward mobility by the growth of official, state-sponsored nationalism (such asMagyar or Russian nationalism). The intelligentsia was also the social sectormost aware of, and obsessed by, the model of the Western nation-state as aninstrument of political progress and collective empowerment.1 To be sure, strong

3 On the Eve of WarThe Intelligentsia as Vanguard ofNationalism

feelings about matters of ethnonational identity readily stirred members of theless educated masses as well. But it was the intelligentsia that took the lead intrying to articulate collective sentiments and that aspired to shape them. It was inthe course of the First World War and its aftermath that the pitfalls of this sort ofintellectual self-involvement manifested themselves most clearly, as we shall see insubsequent chapters.

A common dilemma for these nationalist vanguards was how to reconcile thecultivation of ethnic particularism with the emulation of foreign models, thequest for cultural authenticity with the embrace of universalistic values. In theireffort to find common ground between these conflicting impulses, they tended toembrace very broad definitions of what constituted the nation and whobelonged to it. Such expansive conceptions of national identity correspondedmost closely to the personal experiences and emotional needs of educated,urban sophisticates and intellectuals whose lives were no longer bound up withthe tightly knit socio-cultural fabric of parochial communities, yet who yearnedfor a sense of morally engaged communal fellowship that would complementrather than contradict their own semi-cosmopolitan lifestyles and outlooks. Bydefining the nation in the most sweeping terms possible, they also created apotential need for an educated, politically conscious vanguard like themselves toplay a leading role in integrating heterogeneous societies into cohesive wholes.

Many members of nationalist elites saw themselves as cultural intermediarieswho could draw strength and inspiration from the folk traditions of theirpeoples, while bringing universal principles of enlightenment to the masses andleading them in the establishment of social and political justice. The achieve-ment of national self-determination – be it in the form of autonomy orindependence – was often linked to a vision of harmony and cooperation amongnations, whose relations with each other would resemble those of individuals in ademocracy.

While liberal-democratic and social-democratic activists played highly visibleroles in shaping nationalist ideologies, they did not always go unchallenged. Inquite a number of cases, their views were attacked by right-wing rivals whoregarded the nation as a quasi-biological organism and contended that ethnickinship was the only legitimate foundation for political community – and theonly valid source of political values. These versions of nationalism were alsotransformative and expansive – but in far more sinister ways. Rather thanfocussing on the political integration of diverse communities around a commonset of civic values and cultural projects, some right-wing nationalists advocatedthe purification of the nation by purging it of unassimilable minorities. Whenlooking outward, they rejected democratic universalism, often cultivating aggres-sive visions of territorial expansion instead.

In one form or another, this division cut across many of the nationalist intelli-gentsias in Europe and the Middle East. As long as the multinational empiresremained intact, its implications remained largely theoretical – although eventssuch as the Dreyfus Affair in turn-of-the-century France had already shown howpivotal the clash between liberal nationalism and integral nationalism2 could be

On the Eve of War 35

in the political development of an established nation-state. The collapse of theempires in 1917–1918, and the consequent triumph-by-default of the principleof national self-determination, was to turn the question of what constitutednational identity into a life-and-death matter for millions.

Conflicting Nationalist Agendas in East Central Europe

Poland

Perhaps the most clear-cut example of a nationalist movement riven betweeninclusive and exclusive visions is the Polish case. By the early years of the twen-tieth century two very distinct currents had emerged within the broad compassof Polish nationalist politics. Both had arisen in the Russian partition of Poland,the demographic and cultural heartland of the dismantled country, but hadestablished affiliates – or at least close contact with like-minded counterparts – inAustrian-ruled Galicia and in the German partition. Józef Piłsudski led thenationalist wing of the Polish Socialist Party, which embraced an inclusiveconception of Polish national identity based on a territorial/political definitionof citizenship. Roman Dmowski’s National Democratic movement preached astridently intolerant brand of integral nationalism that identified the welfare ofthe nation as the supreme ethical and political value, and defined the nation inpseudo-biological terms. Anti-Semitism was a central feature of the NationalDemocrats’ ideology and modus operandi. While many other political parties andmovements (such as the Galician conservatives and new peasant parties) playedimportant roles in Polish politics throughout this period, we will focus in thissection upon the figures of Piłsudski and Dmowski, for the rivalry between them– and between the ideas they represented – was to dominate the Polish politicalscene until Piłsudski’s death in 1935.3

Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935) was a curious amalgam of aloof aristocrat andradical conspirator, leftist politician and paternalistic autocrat. He was born andraised in the region around Vilnius, whose population was a mixture of Poles,Jews, and Lithuanians. He was himself of Lithuanian aristocratic stock on hisfather’s side and Polish heritage on his mother’s. (His brother was to join aLithuanian national committee in Switzerland during the First World War, at atime when Lithuanians and Poles under German occupation were disputing thefuture disposition of Vilnius!)4 Suffering from bouts of severe depression andself-doubt, Piłsudski seems to have taken little interest in his formal studies inVilnius and Kharkov, and to have found relief and solace in secret readinggroups and conspiratorial activities. Positivist and materialist philosophy (Comte,Büchner) was the main form of intellectual nourishment for the young people inhis circle, and the terrorist activities of the Russian populist underground organi-zation Narodnaya Volya (the People’s Will) the main source of politicalinspiration.

Piłsudski’s involvement in a Vilnius-based secret society linked to NarodnayaVolya led to his trial and sentencing to five years in Siberian exile in the wake of

36 On the Eve of War

Narodnaya Volya’s unsuccessful 1887 attempt on the life of Tsar Alexander III.5

Having been exposed to Marxist ideas during his last year in Vilnius,6 Piłsudski’sassociation with socialism was strengthened by the close bonds he developedwith a number of left-wing activists into whose company he was thrown in hisvillage of exile. Following his return to Poland in 1892 at the age of 24, he wasquickly drawn to the newly formed Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and rose rapidlyto a dominant position within the nascent organization’s Central Committee.

The PPS was one of two major Polish socialist parties that came into beingduring this period. Its rival was the SDKPiL (Social Democracy of the Kingdomof Poland and Lithuania), led from abroad by the exiled Rosa Luxemburg. TheSDKPiL adhered strictly to the principle of proletarian internationalism anddenounced any form of nationalism as a distraction from the class struggle. Forits part, the leadership of the PPS insisted that the interests of Polish workerscould best be protected within the framework of Polish national self-determina-tion. As Piłsudski saw it, the peoples of the western borderlands of the Russianempire were more developed economically and culturally and had a politicallymore conscious working class than the Russian heartland, and were therefore farriper for revolution than the rest of the empire.7

This was a Marxist justification for a nationalist program. For Piłsudski, themain attraction of socialism was its potential as an instrument for the mobiliza-tion of the Polish working masses on behalf of a separatist movement. Ofaristocratic background himself, he felt strong ties to the romantic tradition ofmilitant resistance to foreign occupation. But he also recognized that uprisingssuch as those of 1830 and 1863 had failed due to insufficient popular supportand inauspicious international circumstances. He wished to revive Poland’s long-dormant heroic tradition, but to fuse it with modern methods of massmobilization while leavening it with a measure of Realpolitik. With its emphasison the vital role of an ideological/political vanguard in mobilizing and leadingthe masses, and its propensity for conspiratorial tactics, revolutionary socialismexerted a powerful attraction on Piłsudski. The prominence he quickly achievedwithin the PPS (due in part to having joined it at a time when it consisted of nomore than one or two dozen members) also satisfied his powerful urge to becomea leader of men.

His notion of Polish national identity was closely linked to the historical tradi-tion of the early modern Polish state, which had been dominated by the Polishlanguage and culture but whose ruling class had been a gentry of multiethnicbackground. He hoped to incorporate most of the territories of the defunctCommonwealth into the future Polish state by structuring it as a Polish-led, multi-national federation. He appeared to think of national identity in terms of culture,language, historic tradition, and political values, rather than in narrowly ethnicterms, and was relatively immune to the anti-Semitism which was so pervasive inPolish society. Yet this attitude of tolerance and inclusiveness was not concretizedin a clear and consistent political program, and it was hard to say what specificinstitutional form the PPS’s vision of a multinational federation was to take.

Piłsudski’s conception of the revolutionary struggle highlighted the cohabita-tion of romantic and realistic, archaic and modern, elements within his rather


enigmatic political persona. While eager to use agitation and propaganda tofoster a heightened sense of political and national consciousness among theurban masses of a rapidly industrializing Poland, he retained a strong proclivityfor conspiratorial methods even as the PPS grew into a broad-based, mass move-ment. Much of his energy during the first years of the twentieth century wasdevoted to the creation of a trained, paramilitary elite organization under hispersonal command. This strike force – which came to be known as the CombatOrganization – was to be held in reserve until the time was propitious forlaunching an armed uprising against the oppressive Russian state. The PolishSocialist Party and the growing trade union movement affiliated with it were tofunction as instruments for generating mass support for such an uprising and asrecruitment bases for a highly motivated liberation army. The final strugglewould take the form of a popularly supported war of independence rather thana social revolution.

The combination of nationalist self-affirmation with the endorsement ofworking-class interests was a highly attractive package, and by the end of the1905 Revolution, the PPS had emerged as the largest socialist party in RussianPoland (with 55,000 members, plus 37,000 members of affiliated trade unions).But the growth of the party created internal tensions that it ultimately failed tocontain. For many of the younger intellectuals who swelled the ranks of the PPSduring these years, Piłsudski’s political approach seemed like a throwback to theglorious but futile gentry-led uprisings of 1830 and 1863. The growing left wingof the PPS was convinced that the key to success lay in coordinating the effortsof socialist movements throughout the Russian empire with a view to over-throwing the tsarist system, rather than preparing to confront the Russian armyon the battlefield in an old-fashioned military contest.

These ideological and tactical disputes led to a split in the movement in theaftermath of Russia’s 1905 Revolution. The party’s left wing formed the PPS-Left, which was to join with the SDKPiL after the First World War in formingthe Polish Communist Party. Piłsudski’s old guard, of which three thousandmembers of the Combat Organization formed the core, established itself as thePPS-Revolutionary Faction. With its armed struggle reduced to a string of spec-tacular robberies (including a 1908 mail-train hold-up in which Piłsudskipersonally participated, bagging a total of 200,000 rubles), the CombatOrganization found itself hard pressed by the Russian authorities, who infiltratedits ranks, drew it into traps, and arrested many of its members. Piłsudski himselfseemed to retreat into a bitter and self-absorbed cult of resistance for resistance’ssake, a quixotic parody of the aristocratic ethos. In a letter composed on the eveof his 1908 train raid, he wrote:

I fight and die only because I cannot live in the shithouse that is our life. It isan insult [underlined in the original] – do you hear me? It insults me as adignified, unenslaved human being. Let others play at growing flowers, or atsocialism, or at Polishness, or at whatever in this shithouse. I cannot! This isnot sentimentalism, not procrastination, not a route to social evolution or


anything else. It is ordinary human dignity. I wish to win. And without afight and a fierce fight at that, I am … merely a beast of burden beaten withstick or whip. …8

Ultimately forced to retreat from Russian Poland, Piłsudski and a few hundred ofhis fighters found refuge in Galicia in 1909. Here, Austrian military intelligencelooked with favor upon his renewed attempt to create volunteer legions thatwould be ready to march against the Russians in the event of war among theGreat Powers. Yet while Piłsudski looked to the support of the Central Powersagainst the Russians, his rival Dmowski scoffed at both his organizational tacticsand his diplomatic vision as products of romantic self-delusion. The NationalDemocrats, Dmowski insisted, were the only movement capable of uniting thePolish people and leading them to self-government through the pursuit of thehard-nosed politics of realism.

Roman Dmowski (1864–1939) was born near Warsaw to a lower-middle-classfamily of artisanal background. He attended the Russian University in Warsaw,obtaining an advanced degree in biology in 1892. It was during his universityyears that he became affiliated with a small, new nationalist organization whichhe soon gained control of, and which he transformed into the nerve center of abroader political movement known as National Democracy (commonly referredto as the Endecja, after the Polish pronunciation of its acronym, ND).

In developing the Endecja’s ideology, Dmowski took elements of Russianpopulism, scientific positivism, and socialist organizational tactics, and blendedthem into a novel nationalist synthesis with a decidedly right-wing orientation.He rejected the socialist principle of class struggle as inimical to the nationalinterest. He chided the Polish conservatives for their unwillingness to challengethe political status quo and for their single-minded focus on material progress andindustrialization to the exclusion of political and cultural development of thenation. Yet he also attacked the tradition of Polish armed resistance to tsaristpower, dismissing past uprisings as foolhardy displays of aristocratic bravadowhich had only brought disaster to the country time and time again.

The most distinctive features of Dmowski’s ideology were his explicit anddisdainful rejection of many aspects of Poland’s historical legacy, his incorpora-tion of virulent anti-Semitism as an integral aspect of his political program, andhis advocacy of negotiation and accommodation, rather than direct confronta-tion, with the Russian government, as the surest means of gaining some form ofnational self-determination. In Dmowski’s view, the supposedly glorious past ofthe Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth provided an object lesson in how not toorganize a state and society. The szlachta (gentry) that had dominated earlymodern Poland had allowed a corrupt and self-serving ethos of individualism toundermine the collective interests of the nation and bring the state to ruin. Thelack of a strong, central government had made Poland notoriously vulnerable tothe machinations of other powers and had left it virtually defenseless against theneighbors that had partitioned it. The szlachta’s reliance on Jews to fulfill thecommercial and financial role of a middle class had prevented an indigenous


Polish bourgeoisie from forming until the nineteenth century. The continuedpresence of a large Jewish minority in Poland, Dmowski insisted, constituted anobstacle to the modernization of Polish society.

As for the international dimension of the Polish problem, Dmowski saw theexpansionist and assimilative potential of the strong, industrialized, Germanstate as posing a greater danger to the Poles’ long-term prospects than thehaphazard and inconsistent abuses of the tsarist regime. In the long run,Dmowski hoped to see a self-governing Congress Poland expand into the Polish-speaking regions of Germany, in the context of an alliance with Russia. As acorollary to this view, Dmowski also contended that it behooved the Poles toforego their claims to the easternmost territories of the defunct Commonwealth,both in order to effect a long-term reconciliation with Russia and because themajority of the population there was non-Polish. Ensuring a relative degree ofethnic homogeneity for the future Polish state was much more important in hiseyes than repossessing every inch of ground to which Poland could attach ahistorical claim.

While the Endecja’s leading circles were dominated by members of the intel-ligentsia, Dmowski aspired to encompass all major Polish social classes in hismovement. Separate mass organizations were created for peasants, workers, anduniversity students. The doctrine of class struggle was rejected in favor of acorporatist ethos that stressed the need for cooperation and compromisebetween workers and industrialists, peasants and landowners, all in the name ofnational unity. There was also a strong current of anti-clericalism in the move-ment, whose chief ideologue fancied himself a scientific realist who valued thenation above all competing loyalties. Over the years, the Endecja’s mass organi-zations succeeded in gaining large followings and helped boost electoral supportfor the party in elections to the Russian Duma, while the movement’s leadershipcontinued to function as a semi-conspiratorial elite that shaped the maincontours of its affiliated organizations’ activities from above.

Dmowski’s approach, then, represented an intriguing combination of elitismand populism. In many ways, he was more modern and sophisticated in his polit-ical tactics than Piłsudski, who always seemed to prefer working toward his endsthrough spectacular coups de main rather than patient organizational spadework,and who appeared more comfortable conspiring with a small network of loyalconfidants than coordinating the activities of a mass movement. Dmowski waswilling grudgingly to acknowledge Piłsudski’s patriotism, but disdained theromantic elements in his worldview and derided him for choosing the socialistmovement as a vehicle for his nationalist agenda.

Like many liberal nationalists, Dmowski thought the intelligentsia must playthe role of a vanguard that would raise the cultural and political consciousness ofthe masses, but his understanding of what constituted political enlightenmentwas quite distinctive. For Dmowski it was a matter of convincing Poles to castaside the overly individualistic ethos bequeathed them by the old aristocratic eliteand learning to place the collective interest of the nation above the concerns ofthe individual. Dmowski’s justification of this approach represented a crude


transposition of biological notions to politics: the nation must be thought of as aliving organism with a single, irreducible identity and a natural (if occasionallydormant) survival instinct. Its rules of conduct toward other peoples were to bedetermined not on the basis of a universalistic code of ethics but by the law ofthe jungle. Strategic alliances (e.g. with Russia) could be forged on the basis ofcommon interests, but sentiment and conventional notions of morality had noplace in determining relations among peoples. Hence his attitude toward theJews, who constituted some 10 per cent of the population in the territories of theformer Commonwealth, and around 30 per cent of the population in manytowns and cities. Dmowski regarded the Jews as an alien infestation that had tobe dislodged if the Polish national organism was to thrive. A small proportion ofthem might be assimilated into the body politic through cultural assimilation; thegreat majority needed to be pushed out of their socio-economic niches and ulti-mately removed physically from Poland. Human rights considerations and theprinciples of tolerance were luxuries that established great powers like Britainand France might be able to afford. But if Poland was to advance into the ranksof the modernized nations, it must not be distracted by such niceties.

In Dmowski’s mind, this approach represented the substitution of scientificmethod for historical nostalgia (Poland’s bane) as the foundation for politicalaction. In its essence, however, his worldview was irrational. The application ofbiological imagery to politics may add color to theoretical discussions, but to takesuch metaphors literally and shape one’s policies accordingly constitutes an exer-cise in self-delusion rather than the triumph of reason. More specifically, hisconception of national integration and his choice of political tactics tended tobreed division rather than foster unity. Intent upon transforming his organizationinto an all-embracing national movement, he set out to destroy potential rivalsfor mass support. The main National Democratic trade union organizationsought to undermine working-class support for the wave of strikes launched bythe PPS during 1905–1906. Not only did this result in violent confrontationsbetween rank-and-file members of rival unions, it was accompanied by anorchestrated assassination campaign waged by Dmowski’s activists againstsocialist trade-union leaders in an attempt to decapitate their organizations.Dmowski was ready to engage in a low-level civil war (which cost some 1,000casualties) in the name of national unity.

When it came to the Jews, he did not feel bound by the slightest pretense oftolerance. Anti-Semitism was an explicit and essential aspect of the Endecja’spolitical program, and, starting in 1912, Dmowski put his beliefs into practice byorganizing an economic boycott against Jewish stores and businesses. The ideawas that this would function as a sort of ethnic protectionism that could providean opportunity for the Polish middle classes to supplant their Jewish rivals.Beyond that, common action against the “aliens” in their midst was a way forPoles of every class and region to recognize the commonality of their interestsand to express a spirit of national unity.

Although Dmowski drew much of his support from the lower middle classes,his efforts at forging a broader inter-class coalition were not altogether in vain.


Thousands of peasants and workers enrolled in the Endecja’s front organiza-tions,9 and Dmowski was respected as a man of keen intellect and discerningpolitical vision by many members of the intelligentsia. His tactics of mass mobi-lization combined with diplomatic opportunism did not win Congress Poland theautonomy he hoped to gain from Russia; but he did very clearly succeed inmarginalizing the old conservatives, many of whom ended up lending support tohis movement. He was also successful at securing financial contributions fromindustrialists and landowners who relied on him to use his influence to containradical impulses among the working class and the peasantry, and who applaudedhis zeal in combating the socialists. The split within the ranks of the PPS left theNational Democrats as the largest and best-organized mass movement inRussian Poland, with strong organizations in the Austrian and German parti-tions as well. The First World War, however, would give Piłsudski an opportunityto stage a dramatic comeback, and much of the interwar Polish republic’s polit-ical history was to be shaped by the rivalry between Piłsudski’s and Dmowski’spolitical camps.

Czechs and Slovaks

The advanced stage of industrial development and rich associational life of theCzech lands, combined with the relative tolerance of the Habsburg regime, wereconducive to the formation of a less polarized and volatile political culture thanthat of Russian Poland. A basic core of pluralistic values was shared, to a greateror lesser extent, by all the major movements within the Czech nationalist camp.Czech nationalism was, nonetheless, divided by some important disagreementsin emphasis and orientation that loosely paralleled the starker polarities of otherEast European nationalist movements. This can be seen most clearly in thecontrast between the nationalist ideologies of Karel Kramář’s Young Czechs andTomáš Masaryk’s Realist Party.

Among the various parties whose central and explicit concern was the asser-tion of Czech national rights, the Young Czechs were one of the most prominentand influential. Their major constituency was the new Czech industrial bour-geoisie that had sprung up in the second half of the nineteenth century. TheYoung Czechs had split off from the former mainstream nationalist party –thenceforward known as the Old Czechs – in 1874. The Old Czechs’ politicalprogram was informed by the values of the traditional landowning elite ofBohemia. It strove to reassert the historic powers of the noble- and gentry-dominated Bohemian Diet, and adopted a passive form of resistance (e.g. aboycott of the Austrian Reichsrat) to initiatives associated with the centralizationof the Austrian state.10

The Young Czechs represented a more modern form of nationalist ideologythat incorporated elements of liberal thought, but that stopped short of fullyembracing a Western-oriented, democratic universalism. They retained anattachment to the principle of Bohemia’s historic state right as a basis for theirautonomist demands, while also arguing that the mostly Czech, but historically


distinct, province of Moravia should be merged with Bohemia in a self-governing Czech region. Rejecting the Old Czechs’ boycott of the Austrianparliament, they jumped at the opportunity to advance their views in theReichsrat, yet remained rather ambivalent toward the prospect of universalmanhood suffrage, from which – as a party of the urban middle classes – theystood to lose electorally.

While the Young Czechs officially disavowed anti-Semitism, they were notabove pandering to popular prejudice in their newspapers and public speeches.The fact that Bohemian Jews tended to gravitate toward German language andculture made them suspect in the Young Czechs’ eyes, and Jewish commercialenterprises were viewed as yet another source of unwelcome competition for aCzech bourgeoisie that was (rather successfully) striving to challenge the long-standing hegemony of German-speaking elites.

On the other hand, the Young Czechs were rather uncritical in their attitudetoward tsarist Russia, with which they strove to cultivate cultural and even polit-ical connections on the basis of the romantic notion that the common Slavicheritage of Czechs and Russians somehow transcended the enormous cultural,religious, political, and socio-economic differences between the two societies.The leader of the Young Czechs, Karel Kramář (1860–1937), tried to giveconcrete expression to the pan-Slavic ideal by organizing the shortlived Neo-Slavmovement during the last decade before the First World War. This was anattempt to foster cultural and economic cooperation among all Slavic peoples onthe basis of equality. A few international congresses were held under the auspicesof this movement, and some prominent East European nationalist figures –including Roman Dmowski of the Polish National Democracts – were drawninto it for a period. But the common ties of blood and soul that were supposed tolink all Slavs quickly proved insufficient to withstand the animosities and politicaltensions between Poles and Russians, liberals and reactionaries, and so on.11

One of the prime critics of Neo-Slavism and of the Young Czechs’ unevensynthesis of chauvinism and liberalism, romanticism and opportunism, wasTomáš Masaryk (1850–1937). Having initially collaborated closely with Kramář

under the rubric of the Young Czech Party, Masaryk broke away and formed hisown small party – the Realists – in 1900. Although the Realists never won morethan a handful of seats in the Reichsrat, this sufficed to give Masaryk a promi-nent platform from which to publicize his distinctive brand of liberalnationalism.

Masaryk’s political vision for the Czechs reflected his belief that nations couldand should serve as mediating bodies between individuals and humanity at large.The Czech nation specifically, he contended, had played a critical historical rolein the conception and articulation of universal human values. Masarykportrayed the early fifteenth-century Czech religious reformer and martyr, JanHus, as a central figure in the history of Western civilization who had helped laythe foundations for the modern European Enlightenment. For Masaryk, theCzech national movement was in its essence a spiritual revival that was rooted inthe religious legacy of Hus. Czech nationalism should not be construed as being


an end unto itself, for it had an integral role to play in humanity’s progressthrough history toward an order based on reason, tolerance, and social responsi-bility. The Czechs were a small nation, but one that was spiritually elect – aChosen People in the sense of having an ethical mission to the world. Until1914, Masaryk also downplayed the theme of historic state rights, emphasizinginstead the principle of ethno-cultural self-determination as the most importantmoral basis for Czech political demands. Common language, culture, historicalexperience, and values were to serve as the constitutive elements of a self-governing civil society. By the same token, if the Czechs were tempted bychauvinistic or intolerant impulses, it was the duty of their intellectual and polit-ical elites not to pander to such sentiments – as the Young Czechs routinely did –but to restrain and educate them. Democratic principles were thus constrainedby cultural elitism in Masaryk’s political vision, which can best be described asan idiosyncratic blend of Hussite reformism, Platonic philosophy, Old Testamentprophetic tradition, and scientific rationalism. The label “Realism” that heapplied to this political philosophy was intended to highlight the importance ofdeveloping concrete, forward-looking plans for the socio-economic advancementand cultural revitalization of the Czech people.12

Masaryk’s approach to the Slovak question was closely related to his demo-cratic elitism and to his understanding of the relationship betweenethno-cultural identity and civic community. Masaryk became wedded to thenotion that Czechs and Slovaks were culturally and linguistically so closelyrelated to one another that they could and should be expected to merge into oneCzechoslovak nation. This corresponded to a widespread view among the Czechnationalist intelligentsia to the effect that the more prosperous, industrialized,and culturally vibrant Czechs could serve as a source of inspiration and assis-tance to the more backward Slovaks as they struggled to preserve their identity inthe face of Hungary’s oppressively assimilationist policies.

Masaryk and his followers directed their criticism not only against theHungarian government, but also against the Slovak cultural and intellectualestablishment that ran the Slovak National Party. This conservative elite waspan-Slavic and Russophile rather than Western-oriented in its political outlook.The literary figures who dominated this circle made little effort to cultivate grass-roots support among the peasant masses, although some novelists paid lip serviceto the importance of forging a common bond among intelligentsia, gentry, andcommon people.13 From the point of view of Masaryk and his followers, themainstream Slovak cultural elite had, by the turn of the century, become asource of stagnation rather than a force for progress and enlightenment.

Masaryk’s own intellectual influence served to promote the crystallization of asmall yet vocal alternative Slovak elite. Masaryk’s lectures on politics and cultureat Charles-Ferdinand University had drawn a devoted following that comprisedstudents from a variety of Slavic nationalities of the Habsburg empire, includingSlovenes, Croats, and Serbs as well as Slovaks. For some of the youngermembers of the Slovak intelligentsia, Prague’s cultural and educational institu-tions offered the most readily available means of escaping Hungarian linguistic


assimilation. A number of them embraced Masaryk’s Realism as a dynamicmodel for the rejuvenation of their own Slovak nation. The enthusiastic responseof these Hlasists,14 as they were known, encouraged Masaryk in his own convic-tion that the Czechs had a special responsibility vis-à-vis their Slovak brethren.

Masaryk’s conception of the relationship between Czechs and Slovaks mayhave been a generalization drawn from his own personal experience. A commonthread running through his childhood reminiscences was the uncertain nature ofhis early sense of identity. Growing up as he did in a rural Moravian borderland,and being of mixed Slovak and Germanized Czech parentage, Masaryk’s polit-ical, intellectual, and national consciousness had evolved from an ill-definedethno-linguistic identity as a Slovak to a highly articulate and intellectuallyrefined self-definition as a Czech (and, indeed, a provocative reinterpretation ofwhat it meant to be Czech). It is easy to see how, looking back on his own earlylife, Masaryk might conclude that the Slovaks in general were simply the disad-vantaged, poorly educated branch of a Czechoslovak national family, and thatthe dissemination of Czech culture could serve to raise the Slovaks to a higherlevel of moral, intellectual, and national consciousness. Moreover, the promotionof a Czech civilizing mission toward the Slovaks may have been a way ofconcretizing his belief that nationalism should be more than a collective cult ofself. Rather than wallowing in an endless celebration of their own ethnicity, theCzechs could focus on fulfilling their responsibility toward their “backward”brethren.

It is apparent from the preceding narrative that Masaryk’s brand of nation-alism cannot be categorically described as either civic or ethnic. Its essentialfeature was its attempt to create a synthesis of the two elements. Masarykinsisted that enlightened liberalism was the defining element of Czech nationalculture. The political and cultural values of the Czechs thus placed themunequivocally in the camp of Western, democratic nations, even if theirlanguage and “racial” origins seemed to link them to the autocratic Russians.But this did not mean that Masaryk thought ethnicity was irrelevant to Czechidentity. Masaryk saw the German minority in Bohemia as unassimilable into theCzech nation, and he never quite figured out how to reconcile this fact with hiscivic values. He felt more comfortable with Jews who openly affirmed theirdistinctive sense of national identity than with those who sought to assimilateinto Czech culture. Finally, in the case of Czech relations with the Slovaks,ethno-linguistic affinity was an important consideration for him; it created amedium of direct communication that would enable the Czech intelligentsia totransmit its Western, progressive values to the unenlightened Slovak masses.15 Ina word, Masaryk constantly struggled with the tension between the love of hisnation for its own sake and the commitment to a broader, humanistic ideal. Itwas precisely the fact that he wrestled with this problem that distinguished himfrom the leaders of the Young Czech Party, who were far more inclined tomystify nationhood and to treat it as a prime value to which all other considera-tions were subordinate.


The Dream of Yugoslav Unity

Given Masaryk’s cultivation of close contact with members of the South Slavpolitical and intellectual elites, it is no coincidence that parallels emergedbetween the political cultures of the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav nationalistmovements. Just as Masaryk hoped that unifying the Czech and Slovak peopleswould serve a historically progressive function for them both, so too did someCroat intellectuals embrace cooperation with Croatia’s ethnic Serb minority as away of linking ethnic identities to the development of a broader civic conscious-ness.16

The last decades before the First World War were a period of intense ideolog-ical fermentation and bewildering political realignments in the South Slav lands.The repressive, Magyarizing policies of Khuen-Héderváry during his twenty-year tenure as governor of Croatia (1883–1903) led to a split within the Party ofRight following the death of its founder, Starčević, in 1896. One faction was ledby Josip Frank (1844–1911), a converted Jew who upheld the conservative,Catholic, historic-state-right tradition. Frank’s Party of Pure Right (commonlyreferred to as the Frankists) distinguished itself by adopting a particularly intol-erant and antagonistic attitude toward the Serb minority in Croatia, whosesupport the Hungarian government had periodically tried to cultivate in its effortto isolate the Croatian opposition and whose identification with the neighboringkingdom of Serbia seemed stronger than its loyalty to the Croatian state. Verbaland published attacks against the Serbs, who were portrayed as a fifth column inthe midst of the Croatian nation, were used in a demagogic effort to rallypopular support for the Party of Pure Right. At the same time, Frank abandonedStarčević’s seemingly unrealistic, anti-Habsburg, pro-independence stance,seeking instead to cultivate support in Vienna for the idea of turning the DualMonarchy into a Trialist system, in which a self-governing Croatia would enjoyequal status alongside Austria and Hungary.

The rival faction, calling itself the Croatian Party of Right, actively soughtpolitical cooperation with ethnic Serb parties, in the hope that a united SouthSlav front would be more effective in obtaining concessions from either Budapestor Vienna. This political reorientation came within the context of a broaderideological shift away from the state-right tradition among a segment of theCroat intelligentsia.

Tomáš Masaryk’s teachings and writings played a notable role in shapingsome of the alternative ideologies that sprang up among the Croat intelligentsiaduring these years. The founder of the Croatian People’s Peasant Party, StjepanRadić, was a young intellectual who had been born to a peasant family and hadgone on to study under Masaryk in Prague. Radić sought to apply Masaryk’sRealist principles to Croatian socio-political conditions. He regarded the state-right principle as an outmoded, elitist notion that failed to address the pressingmaterial needs and spiritual deprivation of the peasant masses. In his view,popular self-determination rather than medieval historical precedents consti-tuted the only legitimate basis for demands for self-rule. But before there couldeven be any serious talk of formulating a democratic, nationalist agenda, the


most immediate economic and educational needs of the rural populace had tobe addressed. The traditional subservience to landlords and clergy had to giveway to a new sense of political self-reliance and a propensity for collective action,and it was the duty of intellectuals to commit themselves to the cultivation ofthese qualities among Croatia’s rural folk. The struggle for economic rightswould generate a political consciousness that would ultimately create anauthentic, grassroots expression of Croatian national identity.17

The Masarykian grounding of nationalism in democratic principles ratherthan historical claims resonated particularly strongly among the urban intelli-gentsia of Dalmatia. There was a pragmatic/tactical aspect to such anorientation: this predominantly Croat-populated coastal province had not beenjuridically linked to the historic state of Croatia–Slavonia for centuries, and wasruled directly by Vienna rather than by Budapest. The principle of national self-determination was, therefore, more immediately applicable than that of stateright as a basis for changing Dalmatia’s status and unifying it with Croatia–Slavonia. There was also a cultural predisposition here toward liberal nation-alism. The urban centers that dotted the Dalmatian coast had a centuries-oldtradition of civic pride; Dubrovnik had been a vibrant commercial entrepôt inthe fifteenth through seventeenth centuries and had maintained its status as anindependent city-state (technically under Ottoman suzerainty) until 1806.Dubrovnik’s legacy as a free republic, as well as the cultural influence of thelocal Italian minority, colored the outlook of Dalmatia’s Croat urban elites andenhanced their receptivity to Western liberalism. They saw themselves as anadvanced outpost of enlightenment in the Balkans, a natural aristocracy with aspecial role to play in the furthering of economic, cultural, and political progressin the region.

Urban professionals and intellectuals in Dalmatia looked to Yugoslavism as apolitical and cultural ideal that could help the Catholic Croats and OrthodoxSerbs alike to transcend the administrative fragmentation of the region and worktoward a common goal of democratization and modernization. Moreover, giventhe intermixture of Serb and Croat communities throughout the Habsburg-ruled South Slav lands, the demand for popular self-government would gaincredibility and support if it were put forward as a joint Croat–Serb political plat-form.

Among Croatia’s ethnic Serbs, a new generation of leaders – some of themalso influenced by Masaryk’s teachings – was impressed by the popular demon-strations in Croatian cities that led to the replacement of Khuen-Héderváry in1903, and began to question the wisdom of following their community’s tradi-tional strategy of boycotting the Croatian Sabor (Diet) and currying favor withBudapest in return for Hungarian patronage and protection of Serb religiousand cultural identity within Croatia. Grassroots activism and the forging of abroad popular coalition transcending the Serb–Croat divide might prove a moreeffective means of gaining the attention, and possibly cooperation, of Budapest,and of achieving greater self-rule for a Croatia in which Serb collective rightswon respect from a democratized Croat community. Meanwhile, across the


border in the kingdom of Serbia, a bloody coup d’état in 1903 replaced theObrenović dynasty with the Karadjordjević, and brought to power an aggres-sively irredentist, anti-Austrian government in Belgrade. The new regimehungrily eyed the Habsburg-administered province of Bosnia-Herzegovina, andeagerly encouraged the development of Croat–Serb cooperation against themonarchy.

It was against this backdrop that, in 1905, at the initiative of two urban intel-lectuals from Dalmatia, Ante Trumbić (1864–1938) and Frano Supilo(1870–1917), the Croat–Serb Coalition (HSK) was formed as a bloc that initiallyincluded all the main ethnic Serb parties and most moderate Croat groupings.The Frankists and Radić’s Croatian People’s Peasant Party stayed out of thecoalition. With its fresh, new, democratic approach, the HSK rapidly moved tothe forefront of political life in both Croatia proper and in Dalmatia. In fact, thiscollaborative effort between Croat and Serb leaders also marked the first exercisein systematic inter-Croat political cooperation across the Dalmatian–Croatianborder. The evolution of Croat national consciousness and the forging of Serb–Croat ties seemed to be going hand-in-hand with one another.

On the eve of the First World War, the attitude of the Croat intellectual andpolitical elites toward Serbs remained highly ambivalent. On the one hand, theCroats generally thought of themselves as more sophisticated, educated,economically advanced – in brief, more European – than the Serbs. The Croatleaders in the HSK certainly did not advocate the merging of the Croat andSerb nations, but only their close cooperation within the framework of theHabsburg territories. On the other hand, there was a widespread fascinationwith, and admiration for, the Serbian tradition of militant independence and thehistory of Serbian armed resistance against the Turks. Indeed many of thenationalist youth movements (including the Frankist youth movement – YoungCroatia) that sprang up throughout the Croat-populated lands during the lastyears before the First World War tended to idolize the Serbs as true South Slavoriginals, men of simple virtues and unbending willpower who were unsullied bythe effete values and intellectual dilettantism of Central European culture.Austria–Hungary’s 1908 annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (whose Croat-populated regions were not merged administratively with other Croatian territo-ries), and its maladroit efforts to repress South Slav nationalism, only increasedthe frustration of Croat elites during the last years before the outbreak of theFirst World War. Yet the long-term prospects for political cooperation betweenCroats and Serbs within the Habsburg empire, let alone between HabsburgCroats and the kingdom of Serbia, remained clouded by uncertainty.18

Synopsis

By 1914, an ideological bifurcation had, to varying degrees, emerged within thenationalist camps of each of these East Central European societies. On one sideof the divide stood those who embraced a progressive, Western-oriented visionof social or liberal democracy as the only valid framework for the expression of


national identity. Masaryk’s Realists, Slovakia’s Hlasists, and the founders ofCroatia’s HSK fall clearly into this group. All of these parties emphasized thedemocratic principle of popular self-determination, rather than the older,socially conservative and elitist doctrine of historic state right, as the basis fordemands for national autonomy within the framework of a reformed Habsburgmonarchy. Piłsudski is somewhat harder to categorize, given his pattern of ideo-logical opportunism and his romanticization of the defunct Polish state and itslegacy of gentry nationalism. But this particular state tradition had come to bewidely identified (accurately or not) with progress toward a politically liberal andculturally tolerant constitutional system – progress that had been cut off by thecountry’s dismemberment in the late eighteenth century.

In all these cases, there was a strong emphasis on interethnic cooperation,integration, or federation as a key to political success and to the development ofa progressive, democratic political culture. Such ideas were clearly marked by theexperience of politics in multinational empires, where the central authoritiesrelied heavily on divide-and-rule methods to preserve the status quo. Forgingcooperative links among nationalities was an obvious way of challenging suchtactics. This cooperation was to draw on elements of linguistic similarity andshared historical experience that supposedly made natural partners out ofCzechs and Slovaks, Serbs and Croats, Poles and Ukrainians or Belorussians. Atthe same time, such interethnic nation-building partnerships were viewed astransformative enterprises that would transcend the limitations of self-absorbedfolk consciousness and help forge a link between nationalism and socio-politicalmodernization and liberalization.

The right-of-center movements that disputed these views ranged in characterand political orientation from the hate-mongering ethno-populism of Poland’sNational Democrats and Croatia’s Frankists, to the Young Czechs’ unevenmixture of bourgeois liberalism and Russophile romanticism, to the Slavophileelitism of the Slovak intellectual establishment. Like their more liberal counter-parts, many of these movements stressed the importance of developinginterethnic cooperation among Slavic peoples, but more on the basis of a senseof primordial kinship and common Slavic spiritual essence than through thejoint cultivation of concrete political programs based on explicitly articulated,progressive goals. In their view, ethnic identity and Slavic heritage weresomehow to inform political values, rather than vice versa.

Populism, Socialism, and Nationalism in the RussianEmpire

The propensity of nationalist ideologues in East Central Europe to project allmanner of virtues and flaws, world-historical roles and retrograde characteris-tics, onto Russia was a function not only of their own conflicting agendas andaspirations, but also of Russia’s uncertain self-definition. The Russian empirewas a society in flux, and no nationality within it was more riven by disputes overwhat constituted its national essence than the Russians themselves.


Despite the extreme complexity of Russian political life during the last decadebefore the First World War, the rough distinction between liberal and integralforms of nationalism that we have drawn in prior instances can be discernedhere as well.

At the far right of the political spectrum, parties such as the proto-fascistUnion of Russian People presented themselves as defenders of the principles of“Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality,” a militantly reactionary slogan that hadfirst been propagated by Tsar Nicholas I’s Minister of Education in 1833.19

They rejected parliamentary constitutionalism as a Western import alien to thespirit of the Russian nation. In the tradition of the nineteenth-centurySlavophiles, they adhered to a romantic image of the tsar and the RussianOrthodox Church as the only legitimate sources of political and spiritualauthority in Russia. As for ethnic minorities, either they were essentially Russianswho had to be brought back into the national-religious fold through the elimina-tion of non-Orthodox churches and by means of linguistic assimilation (thisapplied to Belorussians and Ukrainians), or they constituted foreign bodies in theRussian organism, to be left alone, marginalized, or repressed, depending ontheir collective attitude toward the Russian state and the interests of the Russianpeople.20

To the left of center, the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) hoped thatthe 1905 Revolution was the beginning of a process that would lead to the emer-gence of a progressive, civil society in Russia based on parliamentary democracyand popular sovereignty. In a multinational state such as Russia, it was also essen-tial that ethnic minorities be actively included in this process of civicdevelopment. This meant the revocation of discriminatory and repressive legisla-tion against groups such as the Jews. It would also involve the granting ofcultural autonomy and in some cases (notably Poland and Finland) regional self-rule, to non-Russian nationalities. This would defuse ethnic tensions andencourage each group to look upon Russia as a secure political environmentwithin which it could maintain collective dignity through the unhindered cultiva-tion and public expression of its identity, while also participating on an equalbasis in the life of society as a whole. Implicit in this program was the assump-tion that Russian would remain the predominant language of high culture andthat a tolerant policy toward minorities would stimulate a natural process ofsocial integration and cultural assimilation analogous to that which hadproduced modern nation-states in Western Europe.21

This optimistic – if not very carefully thought through – approach to thenationality question was shared, mutatis mutandis, by Russia’s largest left-wingpopulist movement, the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs). While the SRs’vision of radical social reform was based on a romanticized image of an idiosyn-cratically Russian ethno-cultural phenomenon – the peasant commune – theywere convinced that the common quest for social justice would create anunbreakable bond among all the peoples of Russia once the oppressive tsaristregime was overthrown. They went beyond the Kadets by endorsing the prin-ciple of political as well as cultural autonomy for all the major ethnic groups, not


just the Poles and Finns. Again, the idea here was that granting self-rule to non-Russian peoples would end their sense of humiliation and defuse interethnictensions, facilitating the strengthening of civic ties that transcended ethnicity.

The Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP; also referred to asthe Social Democrats or SDs), which was divided into Menshevik and Bolshevikfactions, adhered to a more rigidly Marxist, internationalist understanding ofclass struggle. From this perspective, nationalism was nothing more than a ploydesigned to distract the working classes of all peoples from their common, revo-lutionary interests. Condemning the tsarist regime’s Russification policies, theSocial Democrats were confident that in the socialist society of the future,national differences would dissolve into a common proletarian consciousness. Yetprecisely because the chauvinistic element in tsarist policy was so alienating tonon-Russian nationalities, paying lip-service to the principle of national self-determination did have short-term revolutionary potential. The Bolshevikswould eventually try and exploit this fact for their own purposes, with far-reaching (if unintended) consequences for the evolution of ethnic politics in theregion. But that is a story that will be pursued in subsequent chapters.

The non-Russian peoples of the empire were so numerous and heterogeneousthat this overview can only touch briefly on a selection of cases designed to illus-trate the ideological range of nationalist movements among them. (The case ofPoland, which lends itself particularly well to comparison and contrast with theCzechs and South Slavs throughout the period covered by this book, has beenincluded in the previous section of this chapter.)

The dominant modes of political thought and action among nationallyconscious minority intellectuals evolved in ways that closely reflected develop-ments among the Russian oppositional intelligentsia. Russian left-wing populism(narodnichestvo) was a particularly influential model. The Russian populists (narod-niki) of the second half of the nineteenth century had undertaken theirresistance to the tsarist regime in the name of a peasantry that they romanticizedas a repository of cultural authenticity and idealized as heir to a primordialtradition of communal life and social justice. Russian populism was an appealingand highly malleable ideological model for activists of any nationality who wereattempting to link ideals of social and political progress to a sense of culturaldistinctiveness and rootedness in a tradition of their own, and who were trying tocommunicate broad conceptions of national identity and political democracy tothe parochial and socially conservative world of the rural masses.

While celebrating distinct folk traditions and cultivating separate ethnic iden-tities, left-wing populist brands of nationalism also endorsed the idea of fosteringpolitical cooperation among the various peoples of the empire. They shared acommon antagonism toward the existing state structure and social hierarchy,which were branded as the main culprits in the oppression and alienation of themasses. If the socio-political order were refashioned so as to reflect the true spiritof the masses, harmony would naturally prevail among the various nationalities.The idea of a federation of peoples replacing the autocratic institutions of


empire was particularly appealing to non-Russians who had been educated atRussian universities and exposed to revolutionary ideas.22 Many of their nation-alist projects reflected a life-long search for a way of reconciling and synthesizingtheir intellectual cosmopolitanism and absorption of Russian culture with theircultivation of ethno-cultural distinctiveness.

Thus, Ukrainian nationalists identified the Russian state, not the Russianpeople, as the main villain (since the seventeenth century) in their nation’s histor-ical saga. Indeed, an early association devoted to the cultural revitalization of theUkrainian people called itself the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius, delib-erately invoking the legacy of the missionaries who had brought Christianity toall the Orthodox Slavic peoples, rather than choosing the name of a specificallyUkrainian historical figure.23 In later years, the émigré activist MykhailoDrahomaniv (1841–1895) drew up a constitutional program that would providepolitical and cultural autonomy for Ukrainians within the framework of a demo-cratic federation of Slavic peoples.24

The most prominent articulator of a liberal-progressive vision of Ukrainiannationalism was Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1866–1934), a scholar and publicist whomaintained contact with his compatriots in the Russian empire from his refuge asholder of the first chair in Ukrainian history at the University of Lwów inGalicia (and who was to lead the short-lived Ukrainian Republic of 1917–1918).Hrushevsky embraced the populist-federalist tradition, while cautioning againstsome of his fellow nationalists’ weakness for pan-Slavic programs based on racialchauvinism or naive romanticism rather than democratic principles and enlight-ened self-interest.25 Hrushevsky was particularly opposed to Neo-Slavism. Hefeared that this ostensibly liberal and egalitarian new form of pan-Slavism wouldplay into the hands of reactionary Russian policy and form the basis forPolish–Russian cooperation at the Ukrainians’ expense. (Roman Dmowski’sinitial participation in the movement hardly seemed to augur well for its liberalcredentials.) Like Masaryk, Hrushevsky rejected the uncritical cult of ethnickinship, advocating instead alliances based on shared interests and values.Specifically, he called for Ukrainian cultural exchange and political cooperationwith Belorussians and Lithuanians – fellow peasant nations that shared with theUkrainians a common experience of economic exploitation, political oppression,and forced cultural assimilation at the hands of Polish and Russian elites.26

The most influential ideological stream among Armenian political activistsalso latched onto populism as a framework for the articulation of nationalistaspirations. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutiun –commonly referred to as the Dashnaks) was particularly captivated by the self-sacrificing ethos and the violent and reckless tactics of the second generation ofRussian populists – the terrorist intellectuals of the Narodnaya Volya (People’sWill) organization. Founded in 1890, the Dashnaktsutiun did not initially directits paramilitary activities against the tsarist state. The Ottoman empire, wherethe bulk of Armenians lived, was its first and foremost target. It used RussianArmenia as a base of operations for a campaign of assassination againstOttoman officials, and for spectacular guerrilla and terrorist operations designed


to draw the attention of the European powers to the plight of the Armenianpeople. Administrative reform and autonomy for the six provinces of north-eastern Anatolia (as called for at the 1878 Congress of Berlin) was the Dashnaks’professed objective. Only in 1903, when the Russian authorities threatened theautonomous cultural life of Armenians by seizing control of Armenian Churchproperty and educational institutions (as part of the general effort to Russify andfurther centralize control over the empire’s borderlands), did the Dashnaks turntheir wrath against tsarist officials, assassinating several hundred of them overthe following two years. The galvanizing impact of Russia’s insensitive policybrought thousands of Armenian demonstrators to the streets of Transcaucasiancities, and enabled the Dashnaktsutiun to place itself at the head of a massmovement.27 The outbreak of violent clashes between Armenians and TurkicMuslims (Azerbaijanis) in Baku during the 1905 Revolution further consolidatedpopular support for the Dashnaks. At the same time, the party moved toward theformal incorporation (in 1907) of socialist principles into its platform and gainedadmission into the Second Socialist International, which it hoped to use as aninternational forum for the airing of its nationalist grievances.28

As Russian intellectual movements coalesced into modern political partiesaround the turn of the century, the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) – heirs to thepopulist and terrorist traditions – emerged as some of the most consistent advo-cates of political autonomy for the empire’s nationalities. This, along with theinherent appeal of populist ideology, won the SRs the support of many partiesamong the ethnic minorities (such as the Dashnaktsutiun). New parties formallyaffiliated with the SRs also sprang up among groups such as the Jews (JewishSocialist Labor Party – SERP) and Ukrainians (the Ukrainian Socialist Revol-utionary Party was not founded until 1917, but it rapidly gained a relativelybroad mass following as well as the support and leadership of Hrushevsky).29

Marxist brands of socialism also gained enormous appeal among sectors ofthe oppositional intelligentsia and industrial working class in many regions of theRussian empire during the last two decades before the 1917 Revolution. (Indeed,many of the left-wing populist parties discussed above came to incorporateelements of Marxism into their political programs and rhetoric.) In principle,Marxists were not supposed to concern themselves with issues of national iden-tity, and, indeed, many non-Russian Marxists simply joined the Bolshevik orMenshevik factions of the all-Russian Social Democratic Party. Others, however,preferred to maintain some sort of corporate identity within the Marxist move-ment. Marxist organizations sprang up that were organized along ethnic linesand were devoted to the propagation of socialist ideas among the members oftheir own nationality. Under such circumstances, it was impossible to disentangleissues of class struggle and social justice from demands for cultural autonomyand national self-determination.

As indicated in the previous chapter, most of the empire’s heavily industrial-ized cities lay in the non-Russian western borderlands, and it is therefore nosurprise that Marxist parties seemed to enjoy greater support among the mostlyPolish and Jewish industrial proletariat of these regions than in the less developed


Russian heartland (apart from Moscow and St. Petersburg). The Polish case hasbeen discussed earlier in this chapter. Among left-wing Jewish movements, theLabor Zionists molded Marxist doctrine into a rationalization for their explicitlynationalist program directed at the creation of a Hebrew-speaking, Jewish prole-tarian-communal society in Palestine.30 Their position was challenged by theGeneral Jewish Workers’ Alliance (the Bund, founded in 1897), which insistedthat the destiny of the Jewish masses depended on the outcome of the revolu-tionary struggle within the Russian empire as a whole. In fact, the Bund played arole in the founding of the RSDWP. But while the Bund rejected nationalism perse and insisted that the Jewish proletariat must take up its place alongside itsRussian and other non-Jewish comrades in the war of classes, it rapidly came torealize that Yiddish was a far more effective medium of communication with theJewish masses than was Russian. Its decision to adopt Yiddish as its mainlanguage of propaganda and agitation rapidly led the Bund away from theassimilationist impulses of its early years. The demand for Jewish culturalautonomy (meaning the cultivation of Yiddish secular culture, rather than reli-gious or Zionist culture) within a socialist Russia soon became one of the centralplanks in its political platform. However, the Bund’s attempt to gain recognitionfrom the Social Democratic leadership as a fully autonomous organization repre-senting the Jewish proletariat was rebuffed, leading to the Bund’s withdrawalfrom the party in 1903.31

Curiously, Marxism struck deep roots in Georgia, whose population consistedoverwhelmingly of peasants (some of whom were beginning to seek industrialemployment in cities) and an economically rather backward rural nobility. Here,common resentment of the Armenian commercial bourgeoisie’s rise to regionalprominence may have contributed to Marxism’s appeal. The local branch of theMenshevik organization, led by educated Georgians of noble background,rapidly established itself as the dominant mass organization during the first yearsof the twentieth century. While the Georgian Mensheviks professed their sincerecommitment to the ideal of socialist internationalism, their ideological platformand the nature of their popular appeal clearly reflected an ethnopoliticalagenda.32 As Ronald Suny puts it (sardonically?), “in Marxism Georgians had anon-nationalist ideology that was a weapon against both their ethnic enemies:Russian officials and the Armenian bourgeoisie.”33

Thus, various blends of populist, Marxist, and nationalist themes dominatedthe political thought of intelligentsias among many of the Russian empire’sethnic minorities. While doctrinal differences pitted opposing parties (such asZionists and Bundists) against each other in fierce ideological disputes, one cansay that one of the central issues all of these groups were contending with washow to reconcile the particular with the universal, how to synthesize ethno-cultural identity with internationalist solidarity. Some non-Russian politicalactivists simply joined all-Russian political parties such as the Social Democrats,Socialist Revolutionaries, and Constitutional Democrats. But many others real-ized that, even if the ultimate goal of their political activity was internationalistin scope, they would fail to mobilize their fellow ethnics unless they appealed to


their particularist sentiments. Beyond that, many of the activists were eager tolink themselves to an “authentic” folk tradition as part of their rebellion againstthe hegemony of state-sanctioned high culture and against the culturally levelingaspects of economic and political modernization.

The combination of socialism with nationalism seemed to offer the mostcoherent resolution of this tension. By bringing about true economic and polit-ical equality among human beings, socialist revolution would also bring aboutequality among ethnic groups. (This was a particularly convincing argument inthe many regions where distinctions of class corresponded closely to ethnicdifferences.) By the same token, asserting one’s own (exploited and oppressed)ethnic group’s particular rights and interests could only serve to advance thecause of socialist revolution for the empire as a whole. As in the case of theCzech, Slovak, and South Slav liberal-democratic nationalists, the left-wingnationalists of the Russian borderlands thought of nationalism as a transforma-tive project that would draw on selected themes from their ethnic groups’respective cultures and historical experiences in the course of building a funda-mentally new social and political order embodying universal themes ofmodernity and justice.

This created an atmosphere that was highly receptive to the Austro-Marxists’approach to the nationalities question. Their ideas34 were eagerly seized upon bymany left-wing nationalists in the tsarist state as a systematized theoretical anddoctrinal framework for their own position, and as a basis for clarifying how rela-tions among ethnic groups were to be structured within the future socialist state.The leaders of the Bund, frustrated by the RSDWP’s decision to rebuff theirclaims, were particularly fascinated by the concept of extraterritorial culturalautonomy, which seemed to offer the perfect solution to the plight of thedispersed Jewish masses. In fact, it was Bundist translations of the Austro-Marxists’ works into Russian that facilitated the dissemination of these ideasamong the broad array of ethno-socialist movements in the Russian empire. By1907, a number of parties, ranging from the Armenian Dashnaktsutiun to theBelorussian Socialist Hromada, had declared themselves in favor of combiningextraterritorial cultural autonomy with territorial federalism in the futuresocialist Russia. Geographically concentrated ethnic groups would thus be in aposition to enjoy a certain administrative self-determination, while diasporanationalities as well as transplanted individuals would be free to run state-fundedcultural and educational institutions of their own wherever there were enough ofthem to constitute a community. Acknowledging the legitimacy of ethnic identitywould foster mutual tolerance and promote rather than undermine the consoli-dation of the multinational socialist state. The more channels for ethno-culturalself-expression were created, the more comfortable the various nationalitieswould feel about cooperating with each other. Such thinking provokedscathing ideological attacks on the part of the Bolsheviks, who paid lip serviceto the principle of national self-determination but rejected the idea that asocialist movement should actively seek to nurture cultural divisions among the


proletariat. Eventually, however, the Bolsheviks would themselves feel obliged todevelop a more nuanced (if disingenuous) position on this issue.35

The Muslim intelligentsias of the Russian empire stood at the intersection ofcultural influences radiating from the Middle East and from Russia. The Islamicmodernist movement, which had established itself as a major intellectual force inEgypt under the leadership of scholars and publicists such as the Persian-bornJamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–1897) and his Egyptian student MuhammadAbduh (1849–1905), was an inspiration to the Tatar intelligentsia. Islamicmodernism encouraged the selective adoption of Western ideas and methods aspart of a broader effort to revitalize Islamic civilization. The modernists arguedthat the Islamic world was in apparent decline, not because of flaws that wereinherent to its belief system, but precisely because it had lost touch with theessential spirit and values of Islam. The original message of the Prophet, whichhad formed the basis of a radiant civilization, had over time been covered bylayer after layer of false interpretations, arbitrary edicts (issued by religiousauthorities at the behest of corrupt rulers rather than on the basis of Islamicprinciple), and superstitious customs. This accounted for the sense of stagnationin the Ottoman empire and for its inability to respond effectively to the Westernchallenge. The time had come for Muslims to cast off these paralyzing accre-tions and reconnect themselves with the original spirit of Islam. Islam’s greatflowering during its classical age had itself been a central source of inspiration tothe then relatively backward Europeans, who had acquired their knowledge ofscience, mathematics, etc., from the Muslim world. In adopting some of thetechnological and organizational features of modern Western society, the Islamicworld would in a sense be rediscovering its own foundations, for the beauty ofIslam lay in its perfect marriage of reason with faith.36

Islamic modernism manifested itself among Muslim intellectuals of theRussian empire as the Jadid (“new”) movement. The Jadids saw themselves asleading the way to a spiritual and material renewal of Russia’s Islamic peoples.Their initial focus was on educational reform. The “new method” (usul i-jadid:hence the name of the movement) of education that they championed would doaway with the narrow-minded scholasticism of the traditional Islamic schoolsand introduce modern curricula that included the sciences and that would teachstudents how to think critically. Such ideas clearly threatened to undercut theauthority and status of the Muslim clerical and scholarly establishment. Withinthe Russian empire, Jadidist schools were allowed to develop freely, but inBukhara – the technically sovereign emirate that was the cultural capital ofTurkestan – the emir upheld the authority of the traditional Islamic establish-ment, forcing the Jadidist schools to operate semi-clandestinely.37

The Jadids generally came from wealthy families whose income was derivedfrom commerce, and who constituted a rising bourgeoisie. The Volga andCrimean Tatars, given their longstanding contact and familiarity with Russianculture and education, became the intellectual vanguard of the Jadid movement,infusing it with ideas that reflected the influence of pan-Slavism and populism.The first Muslim newspaper in Russia was established in the 1880s by Ismail-bey


Gasprinsky (1851–1914), a Crimean Tatar who played a pathbreaking role in thedevelopment of Jadidism. The overwhelming majority of the periodicals andother publications associated with the Jadids were written in a fusion of modifiedCrimean Tatar and Ottoman Turkish, a pan-Turkic synthesis that was promotedas a lingua franca among all the Muslim peoples of the empire. This wouldrender the written word more readily accessible to Russia’s Muslim masses, mostof whom spoke Turkic languages and found it difficult to master the Farsi orArabic that were the dominant media of traditional high culture.38 It would alsohelp establish a deeper and more substantive feeling of community among thesocially and geographically fragmented Islamic population of tsarist Russia. Pan-Islamic and pan-Turkist elements thus coexisted within a loosely definedintellectual movement that was trying to spearhead cultural renewal and socialrevitalization, that challenged the authority of the traditional Islamic establish-ment, but that was vague and uncertain about its long-range political goals.

The 1905 Revolution and its aftermath served to hasten the diffusion of theJadids’ ideas and to politicize the movement’s agenda. Muslim delegates in theDuma aligned themselves with the Kadets and issued moderate calls for theinstitution of regional autonomy throughout the empire. The political crack-down from 1907 on, and the associated restrictions on voting rights, could notroll back the changes wrought by the experience of the previous two years. Theoverwhelming majority of the Muslim masses may have remained unfamiliarwith, and suspicious of, the new political ideas, but the intelligentsias were all themore determined to play the role of a socio-cultural vanguard committed to theenlightenment of the masses and to the transformation of society.

In Turkestan, where the electoral restrictions virtually eliminated the possi-bility of regional representation in the Duma, local Jadids began to thinkincreasingly in terms of political independence as the only acceptable solution totheir predicament. Narrowly ethnic constructions of identity remainedcompletely unappealing, however, for the key to success was considered to lie inunity. Most of Russia’s Muslim intelligentsia was in search of an inclusive defini-tion of national identity that could provide a framework for coordinated politicalaction among a wide variety of ethnic groups and social classes. The growingidea that pan-Turkism could constitute just such a framework was reinforced bythe events of 1908 in the Ottoman empire. As we shall see, the Young Turks whoseized power in Istanbul in that year were themselves strongly influenced by agroup of Muslim émigrés from Russia.

Social Elites and Nationalist Intellectuals in theOttoman Empire

From Ottomanism to Turkish Nationalism

Of all the regions examined in this book, the Middle East was the one wheremodern political nationalism took root the latest. As in the case of industrial andtechnological change, however, ideological transformations often take place most


rapidly and most violently precisely in those societies whose elites feel they havethe most catching up to do. While cultural environment, political institutions,and socio-economic conditions in the Middle East were in many ways funda-mentally distinctive, the nationalist movements in this region faced dilemmasthat bore some striking resemblances to those confronted by their Central andEast European counterparts.

In 1908, a coup d’état brought a group of officers, administrators, and intellec-tuals known as the Young Turks (or the Committee of Union and Progress –CUP) to power in Istanbul. In the following years, the Young Turks graduallyconsolidated their position, replacing Sultan Abdülhamit II with the morecompliant Mehmet V in the wake of an attempted conservative countercoup in1909, and using military force to unseat an opposition coalition and concentratearbitrary power in their own hands in 1913.39 The Young Turk revolution inau-gurated the most dramatic and chaotic stage in the checkered history of theOttoman struggle with reform and modernization that had begun with theTanzimat.40 Although the Ottoman defeat in the First World War brought an endto the Young Turk movement per se, Kemal Atatürk’s postwar vision of Turkishnationalism was clearly rooted in the ideas and practices of certain elementswithin the CUP regime.41

Yet it must be stressed that in its original incarnation, the Committee ofUnion and Progress was not constructed as an explicitly Turkish-nationalistorganization. The CUP began its history in 1889 as a group of disaffected intel-lectuals and highly placed administrators who had been exposed to Westernideas through the reformed Ottoman higher-education system, and who werefrustrated by the regime’s inability or unwillingness to act on those ideas and toimplement modernization on a systematic or thoroughgoing basis. Organizingthemselves clandestinely within the Ottoman empire, and operating openly fromexile in cities such as Geneva and Paris, the Young Turks regarded themselves asan intellectual elite whose mission it was to gain power (be it through persuasionor by force) within the Ottoman bureaucracy and to use that power to apply thelaws of science and the principles of reason to the problems of state and society.

Although some of the CUP’s publications played on pan-Islamic themes,most of the Young Turks regarded this as a necessary ploy in the struggle forpublic support rather than a true reflection of their worldview. In their privatewritings and conversations, many of them revealed themselves to be militantlysecular intellectuals; some professed radically atheistic views. Narrowly conceivedforms of positivism and “scientific” materialism (all the rage in mid-to-late-nineteenth-century Europe) were molding forces in their intellectual develop-ment.42 The Young Turks’ central demand was for the restoration of thesuspended Constitution of 1876, which had briefly created a parliamentary formof government for the empire. The most recent research indicates that this posi-tion did not arise from a commitment to democracy as such. Indeed, many ofthe Young Turks subscribed to Gustave Le Bon’s cynical view of the masses as apurposeless, ignorant mob that needed to be guided manipulatively by a forcefulelite.43 The CUP’s constitutionalism served as a political platform from which its


leaders could pursue their goal of transforming the Ottoman system into a truemeritocracy, in which ability to govern and commitment to reform, rather thanloyalty to the Sultan, would be the criteria for success – and in which they,accordingly, would assume the reins of power. This is not to say that they werecompletely insincere in their espousal of parliamentary government; it is just thatthey saw parliamentary government as an instrument for limiting the Sultan’sauthority and for transforming society from above, rather than as a medium forthe expression of popular opinion.

The CUP’s original membership reflected the multiethnic composition of theOttoman state’s administrative elite. Before it came to power, its leading figuresincluded Albanians and Arabs as well as Turks. Graduates of the leading educa-tional institutions of Istanbul, they could all rally around the common strugglefor a restoration of the Constitution and the creation of a meritocratic govern-ment. This platform was so broad that there was even room on it for the radicalArmenian nationalists of the Dashnaktsutiun Party. But what would the practicalimplications of radical political reform be – the centralization of government orregional self-rule, the creation of a unitary national identity or the cultivation ofethno-cultural diversity? These were questions that began to divide the CUPleadership even before it came to power.

It was the conviction of the CUP’s leading figures that the transformation ofthe empire into a modern, powerful state would entail the crystallization amongthe masses of an overarching sense of patriotism and identification with theinstitutions of government. The catchword associated with this notion wasOttomanism – a vague term denoting the cultivation of collective political iden-tity based on civic equality among the peoples of the empire. It remained farfrom clear how an ethnically and religiously neutral cultural foundation for suchan identity could possibly be created. Ottomanism, it soon became apparent,was a very loaded term.

This was reflected in an increasingly acrimonious debate about the futurestructure of the state, and the scope it would allow for cultural autonomy andregional self-government. For most leaders and supporters of the CUP, the milletsystem was a glaring anachronism that would have to be fundamentallyreformed or done away with altogether in a modernized Ottoman state. Butwhat would replace it? If the millets were to be integrated into a more unifiedbody politic, would this involve the forcible assimilation of ethno-religiousminorities into the Muslim majority? That was an unacceptable prospect for theDashnaktsutiun and for ethnic Greek supporters of the CUP. If, on the otherhand, geographically concentrated (compact) minorities such as the Armenianswere to be granted territorial autonomy, would that not play into the hands ofinterventionist foreign powers and lead to the breakup of the empire?

These issues came to a head in 1902, when an effort was made to create abroad opposition front to the Sultan’s regime. The initiative came from PrinceSabahaddin, a disgruntled member of the Sultan’s family who had joined theCUP in exile three years earlier. Sabahaddin sought the active cooperation ofthe Armenian nationalists in the belief that they could help draw the European


powers into a military intervention that would assist in unseating the Sultan andplacing the CUP in power. It was to this end, and with a view to marginalizingrival leaders within the CUP, that Sabahaddin and his supporters in the organi-zation convened the First Congress of Ottoman Opposition in Paris as a forumfor the negotiation of a joint political platform among opposition forces drawnfrom all the major ethnic groups of the Ottoman empire. As these talksproceeded, a number of Young Turks – led by Ahmed Riza – attacked the ideathat foreign intervention was an acceptable means of fostering change in theOttoman empire. More particularly, they expressed their opposition to the veryidea of negotiating with the Dashnaktsutiun as a separate organization. AsAhmed Riza put it:

According to their own words the Armenians want to reach an agreementwith us in order to overthrow the present regime. This type of agreementcan be reached between sovereign states. … But I cannot imagine it betweenthe citizens of the same state who are living in different areas of theEmpire.44

When, in the end, Sabahaddin’s faction accepted language suggestive of aspecial status for the Armenian provinces, Ahmed Riza and his supportersprotested the agreement by splitting away from the CUP. The Young Turk orga-nization fell briefly into abeyance, only to be reconstituted by Ahmed Riza a fewyears later.45

All this seemed to suggest that the restoration of the Constitution wouldcreate more problems than it would resolve, unless the various nationalities ofthe empire could be assimilated into a mainstream, national culture. For Turkishmembers of the CUP, Turkish identity was the obvious and sole candidate forthis role. Rather than trying to construct a modern state purely on the basis ofabstract conceptions of civic equality and Western science, the Young Turkmovement would draw on what was best and most inspiring about the historicalheritage of the Turkish people. Indeed, a growing number of ethnic Turkishleaders in the inner circle of the CUP felt that the old concepts of umma46 andmillet should not be discarded outright; these notions contained valuableelements that could be adapted and combined in a potent new socio-politicalformula that synthesized the social solidarism of Islam with the language andculture of the Turkish-speaking masses.47

It was one of the ironies of the Ottoman empire that its Christian minoritiesenjoyed official recognition as autonomous ethno-cultural communities by virtueof the millet system, while the masses of Turkish speakers had no such distinctframework for the cultivation of political identity and communal solidarity.According to Ziya Gökalp, who emerged as a leading Young Turk ideologue(and was later to play a similar role under Mustafa Kemal’s (Atatürk’s) regime),the Turks should be recognized as constituting a millet in their own right – notjust a millet, in fact, but the millet whose identity and interests should be embodiedby the state. In the vocabulary of Turkish nationalism, millet meant nation,48 and


nationalism would constitute the new religion holding nation and state together.Under the old regime, society was fragmented by rigid hierarchies (based onbirth rather than merit) and by an unbridgeable gap between a high culturebased on alien (Arabic and Persian) foundations, and the culture of the commonpopulace. In a reformed empire, the new intellectual elite would create an offi-cial culture based on the language and traditions of the masses (and morespecifically, on the popular dialect of Istanbul). This, in turn, would lend thatelite the authority to take charge as a leading force in society, a vanguard whoseviews and decisions would be expressive of the fundamental interests of thenation as a whole.49

Many of Gökalp’s conceptual frameworks were derived from the work ofDurkheim and of a variety of German political thinkers (notably Tönnies).While he insisted on cultural-linguistic, rather than racial, criteria for definingnational identity, his brand of nationalism reflected the influence of German,völkisch collectivism. His slogan halka doğru (“toward the people”) was taken fromthe Russian populist movement of the 1860s, but his was an authoritarian formof populism: the political leadership could have no legitimacy unless it drew itsinspiration from the culture of the masses, but it must be ruthless in the exerciseof its power and it must use that power to bring civilization (i.e. education, tech-nology, the various material innovations of the West) to the people. Pluralismand individualism were indulgences that would only threaten the organicintegrity of the nation. Class conflict was incompatible with the goal of nationalunity, and updated versions of traditional craft associations combined with state-funded care for the needy would serve to fend off the threat of socialism.

In its synthesis of cultural populism with political elitism and its corporatisteconomic programs, Gökalp’s thought bore some striking resemblances toRoman Dmowski’s. Indeed, “scientific” materialism and positivism were moldingforces in the intellectual development of the Young Turks and the PolishNational Democrats alike. The result in both cases was a pseudo-rationalist polit-ical philosophy that was used to justify an autocratic approach to the exercise ofpower and to legitimize an organicist conception of the nation.50 It will not besurprising, then, that a growing intolerance toward minorities seemed to go handin hand with the development of Turkish nationalism. Gökalp toyed for a whilewith the idea of giving the Muslim Arabs equal status in an Ottoman empirereorganized as a dual monarchy on the Habsburg model and he insisted that anyindividual who embraced Turkish culture and language must be accepted as aTurk, regardless of his ethnic background. (Gökalp himself was of partlyKurdish ancestry, and had briefly flirted with the idea of fostering Kurdishnationalism before turning to the Turkish ideal instead.) But he insisted thatArmenians and Greeks were alien groups whose economic success constituted ahindrance to the development of a Turkish middle class and whose Christianidentity made them – unlike the Kurds – unassimilable. They had no intrinsicpolitical rights as communities and dwelt amidst the Turkish nation strictly onsufferance.

Another ideological stream that emerged as a growing force within the CUP


in the first years of the twentieth century was pan-Turkism. Pan-Turkist nation-alists defined Turkish identity in explicitly ethnic/racial terms.51 They pointed tothe linguistic affinities between the Turks of the Ottoman empire and the Turkicpeoples of Russian- and Chinese-ruled Central Asia, and insisted that they wereall descended from the same stock and should therefore be incorporated withinone, all-embracing, unitary Turkish state. Political unification on this grand scalewas the destiny of the Turks, and only through it could they reconnect them-selves with their early history and achieve their full potential as a nation. If thenon-Turkish regions of the Ottoman empire, including the Arab lands, had to bejettisoned in the process, that was a price well worth paying for the realization ofthe pan-Turkist dream.52 What the pan-Turkists lacked in political commonsense or historical empiricism, they made up for in their taste for romanticimagery; one of the most popular of their poets addressed his co-ethnics asfollows: “Oh, race of the Turks! Oh, children of iron and of fire! Oh, thefounders of a thousand homelands, oh, the wearers of a thousand crowns!”53

This radical, irredentist brand of pan-nationalism, which gained considerableinfluence within the Young Turk movement from the period just before 1908 tothe end of the First World War, was largely the brainchild of Tatar exiles fromRussia. As we have seen, the creation and propagation of a Turkic lingua francawas one of the central projects of the Jadid movement, and this cultural enter-prise had obvious political ramifications. For the Tatar and other Turkicintellectuals who fled the censorship and oppression of the tsarist regime,Istanbul was not just a place of refuge (indeed, before the 1908 Revolution, theSultan’s regime regarded them with almost as much wariness as the tsaristgovernment had).54 The Ottoman empire was also a potential launching pad fora liberation struggle on behalf of Russia’s Muslims.

Pan-Turkism, then, was a militant response to the aggressive pan-Slavism ofthe tsarist regime. A nationalist movement that confined its aspirations to theTurkish inhabitants of the Ottoman empire was of no interest to these men, forthey had to define national identity in such a way as to encompass the Turkicpeoples of the tsarist empire. This implied an ethno-racial conception of nation-hood that could hardly be inclusive of Arabs or Kurds, let alone Armenians orGreeks. In the pages of their post-1908 publications, and in the cultural andeducational societies they established under the aegis of the newly establishedCUP regime, Russian-born pan-Turkist activists such as Yusuf Akçura, AğaoğluAhmet, and Hüseyinzade Ali struggled to disseminate their views, whilehammering as many nails as possible into the coffin of Ottomanism. For them,the state had meaning only as an embodiment of ethnic identity; the idea of acivic culture arising within the framework of a multiethnic state was an anachro-nistic delusion that stood in the way of pan-Turkist destiny. Indeed, the Ottomanempire might eventually collapse altogether, but destiny would still await theTurks.55

Following his reconstitution of the CUP under his own leadership, AhmedRiza focussed the organization’s efforts on cultivating support among Turkishofficers in the armed forces. It was a military coup launched by officers in


Salonika that brought the Young Turks to power in 1908, and that allowed themto consolidate their political control in the following years.56 The military officerswho soon came to dominate the movement seemed particularly open to cut-and-dried definitions of nationhood that left little scope for nuanced notions of civicidentity and interethnic dialogue. The influence of German officers in Ottomanmilitary academies reinforced the tendency to think of the army as the “schoolof the nation,” and to regard the nation as an organic being defined by a unitaryculture, rather than a collection of diverse communities held together bycommon political values.57

During their first years in power, certain aspects of the Ottomanist vision didmanifest themselves in the Young Turks’ legislative initiatives. Laws were passedthat secularized the judicial system (although family law was not entirely secular-ized), enhanced the rights of women in marriage, and in other ways sought totransform the Ottoman empire into a Rechtsstaat that could invoke a sense ofloyalty and commitment from subjects-turned-citizens.58

Yet the means by which the Young Turks sought to foster such a transforma-tion were laden with inconsistencies and contradictions. The restoration of thelong-suspended Constitution of 1876 seemed to herald the dawn of a liberal-democratic age, complete with empire-wide parliamentary elections andguarantees of freedom of expression. (The Capitulations were not abolisheduntil October 1914.) But real power was concentrated in the hands of a handfulof civilian leaders and military officers who imposed increasingly draconianmeasures to quell dissenting views and popular manifestations of discontent.Armenian demands for autonomy were followed by a series of massacres thatwere officially blamed on reactionary elements that the Young Turk authoritiesseemed – at best – reluctant to curtail.59 While the CUP continued to presentitself publicly as a political vanguard for the peoples of the empire as a whole,rather than for Turks only, recent research by Șükrü Hanioğlu, Erik Zürcher, andothers has confirmed what many non-Turkish elites suspected at the time,namely that the CUP’s innermost councils were dominated by figures who werewedded to the narrow, Turkish-nationalist agendas that have been outlinedabove. The outbreak of the Balkan Wars in 1912 greatly strengthened thealready powerful ethnonationalist and pan-Turkist elements within the leader-ship, and this dynamic gathered further momentum during the First WorldWar.60

From Ottomanism to Arab Nationalism

The CUP’s attempt to modernize the state along the lines of European politicaland administrative models was initially embraced with enthusiasm by theeducated social elites of Damascus, Baghdad, and the other major urban centersof the empire’s Arabic-speaking regions. These elites were dominated by landedurban notables – that is, men who derived large incomes from their enormousrural land holdings, but who lived in cities and used their financial independenceto pursue an education in Turkish institutions of higher learning, returning to


occupy powerful – and lucrative – administrative positions in their nativeregions. Many of them had been involved in CUP activities and had even heldpositions of leadership in the organization during the 1890s. By 1908, Arabswere systematically excluded from any positions of power in the CUP, whoseleaders secretly derided the Arabs as culturally inferior to the Turkish people.61

Nonetheless, the Young Turks’ reform drive initially seemed to hold forth thepromise of creating new avenues of upward mobility for the Arab urban nota-bles. The rigidly stratified Ottoman system seemed to be opening up, and thiscould only benefit provincial elites.

Or so they thought. It did not take long for disillusionment to set in, for oncein power, the Young Turks embarked on a centralizing program that tightenedIstanbul’s administrative grip on the provinces without providing provincial nota-bles with any commensurate increase in access to central power. Moreover, therewere indications of a Turkification campaign in the making, reminiscent of theRussification efforts in the tsarist empire’s borderlands. Arab members of theOttoman parliament who voiced criticisms of these policies found themselvesharassed and prevented from running effective re-election campaigns.

Responses in the Arab world were marked by ambivalence and uncertainty.Arab nationalism was still in its infancy in the early twentieth century, and priorto the First World War, most Arab notables and intellectuals did not seek thebreakup of the Ottoman empire. While some of them had, since the 1850s,occasionally contemplated the possibility of creating an independent state inGreater Syria, they seemed to have done so more out of a sense that theOttoman empire might be a sinking ship, easily vulnerable to the depredations ofEuropean powers, than out of an intrinsic attraction to the idea of political inde-pendence.62 The policies of the CUP-in-power did clearly provoke a widespreadanti-Turkish backlash among Arab social, cultural, and political elites, but thisreaction assumed a variety of forms. A number of regional potentates – such asSayyid Talib in Basra (in southern Mesopotamia) or Sharif Hussein of the Hejaz– seemed ready to flirt with the possibility of foreign alliances or the adoption ofoppositional ideologies in their efforts to resist Istanbul’s encroachment on theirlocal authority. But such behavior essentially conformed to traditional patterns ofcenter–periphery tensions in the empire, and cannot be said to have reflected amodern nationalist sensibility.63

A more recognizably nationalist sentiment can be said to have manifesteditself among members of the commercial and intellectual elites of cosmopolitancities such as Beirut, among younger members of the landowning-bureaucraticnotability of the Fertile Crescent, and among Arab officers who found them-selves passed up for promotion or reassigned to undesirable posts by theirTurkish commanders. Modeling themselves organizationally on the CUP, someof these disaffected elements in Syria and Mesopotamia formed secret societiessuch as al-Fatat (short for Jam‘iyyat al-ummah al-‘arabiyyah al-fatat – The YoungArab Nation Society) and al-‘Ahd (The Covenant),64 while openly propagatingtheir views through political parties such as the Cairo-based OttomanAdministrative Decentralization Party. However, even among these activists, who


did not number more than 100 before 1914,65 the majority did not advocateoutright Arab political independence prior to 1914. Their activities were princi-pally directed against the Young Turks’ centralizing efforts, which threatened toundermine the local and regional power to which Arab elites had been accus-tomed. Cultivating a sense of pride in the historical significance and originalityof Arabic language and civilization, they sought to promote an Arab culturalrenascence accompanied by a greater measure of self-rule within the context ofa reformed and decentralized Ottoman empire. Equal status and regional self-rule for the Arabs within a democratized Ottoman empire was also the demandof the delegates at the Arab National Congress that convened in defiance of theCUP in Paris in June 1913. Those calling for outright Arab political indepen-dence were, during the pre-1914 years, still little more than an isolatedminority.66

While there was clearly a range of ideological orientations and politicalagendas represented in these organizations, the main currents within them drewtheir inspiration from the intellectual movement referred to by latter-day scholarsas Arabism.67 Arabism was several decades old by 1914, and was itself anoffshoot of the Islamic modernism discussed earlier in this chapter. Arabism wasdivided into a number of different streams that differed over such issues as howto define the relationship between Arab identity and Islam, but that shared acommon belief that the revitalization of Arab culture and consciousness wasessential if the Middle East as a whole was to resist the encroachment of theWest. In line with Islamic modernist thought, the Arabists tended to regard polit-ical liberty (at least for the educated elite) and constitutionalism as rooted inIslamic and Arabic traditions, which had been abused and perverted over thecenturies by the Ottoman sultans.68

One of the most influential Arabist thinkers was the Syrian-born RashidRida (1865–1935), who propagated his views through his Cairo-based journal,al-Manar (The Lighthouse).69 A student of Muhammad Abduh’s, Ridacontended that, since Arabic was the language of the Koran and it was theArabs who had brought the world Islam, an Arab national-cultural revival was anecessary precondition for the revitalization of Islamic civilization as a whole.What was good for the Arabs would be good for all Muslims, regardless ofnationality, because Arab identity was directly linked to the universal values ofIslam. It thus stood in marked contrast to what Rida regarded as the narrow,exclusive nationalism of the Young Turks.

Indeed, Rida was scathing in his criticism of the ethnonationalist or racial(jinsi) element in the Young Turks’ ideology, blaming it on their obtuseness andignorance. He pointed out that the Turks actually stood to lose the most in thegame of ethnic politics, since the ethnic principle would reduce their sphere oflegitimate authority to Anatolia, and since the European powers would notpermit them to compensate themselves by pursuing pan-Turkist fantasies inCentral Asia.70 In his eyes, Turkish nationalism was no more than an updatedversion of the tribal solidarity – ‘asabiyyah – that had originally given rise to theOttoman–Turkish state. Disputing Ibn Khaldun’s classic paradigm, Rida argued


that ‘asabiyyah could not serve as the social cement or foundation of authority ina civilized society. Whereas Ibn Khaldun had contended that ‘asabiyyah wasessential to the cohesion and power of the ruling elite in an Islamic state, Ridainsisted that ‘asabiyyah was antithetical to Islam. The historic greatness of theArabs lay precisely in the fact that they had founded a religion that could bringtogether peoples of many different races under an egalitarian rule of law.71

The political implications of this thesis remained vague. Although Rida’scentral focus was on how to revive Islamic civilization, his insistence on thecentrality of the Arabs to any such revival could clearly lend itself to nationalistinterpretations. Indeed, in holding up the Arabs as the fount of Islamic civiliza-tion and the only hope for its redemption, he was running the risk of falling intoprecisely the sort of ethnic chauvinism for which he castigated the Young Turks.Yet by the same token, what might be termed Rida’s cultural nationalism wasconstrained by his very real concern with the broader fate of the Islamic world.72

The institutional ramifications of his thought were similarly ambiguous. InRida’s vision of an ideal Islamic state, political power over such critical issues asthe election of the Caliph would be vested in the hands of a learned andrespected elite that represented the interests of the community as a whole. Wasthis a formula for parliamentary constitutionalism or conservative oligarchy? Inlater years, when some of his own earlier ideas were being adapted and incorpo-rated into secular nationalist and republican ideologies, Rida retreated in alarminto Islamic fundamentalism. But as late as 1922, he was writing treatises thatcould be interpreted as attempts to link Arab national consciousness and Islamicvalues with advocacy of a system of mixed government and rule of law bearingat least some resemblance to a Western-style liberal constitutional order.73

It was ideas such as these that – along with the model of the Young Turkmovement, the example of separatist nationalism in the Balkans, and the influ-ence of Western values and institutions – formed the intellectual and ideologicalbackdrop to the activities of the Arab political societies that sprouted up duringthe last half-dozen years before the outbreak of the First World War. One of thepremises shared by most Arabist political currents was the notion that Arab iden-tity was rooted in the history of Islam, and vice versa. (In later years, even someChristian Arab nationalists would claim to feel an affinity – in a loose, non-reli-gious sense – with the heritage of Islamic civilization.)74 In this early form, then,the idea of Arab nationhood evoked the image of an inclusive cultural andhistoric community which could both accommodate internal minorities andsustain an organic political connection with the Turks, if only the latter wouldaccord it the respect and equality of status it deserved. In principle, Arab iden-tity could be cultivated within the framework of a decentralized Ottomanempire, serving as the catalyst for a reinvigoration of Middle Eastern society as awhole. Should the incompetence of the Young Turks lead to the empire’scollapse, the Arabs would draw on their sense of common values and commondestiny to fend for themselves.

It remained to be seen whether the high-minded values that informed


Arabism could survive the test of power any better than the liberal aspects of theYoung Turks’ ideology had.

Conclusion

The most obvious point to emerge from the above discussion is that these nation-alist movements cannot be understood in isolation from one another. They tookform within multiethnic empires that shared similar problems and commonborders, and there were ongoing contacts and mutual influences among theleaders and ideologues of many of these movements. Masaryk’s ideas directlymolded the outlooks of some leading Slovak and Croatian intellectuals; socialistand populist parties in Austria–Hungary and Russia were engaged in an ongoingdialogue about the nationalities question; the Neo-Slav movement formed ashortlived framework for contact and contention among a variety of Slavicnationalists; the influences of right-wing pan-Slavism and left-wing Russianpopulism converged with that of Islamic modernism to produce the Jadid move-ment among Russia’s Muslim intellectuals, who were also stirred by news of theYoung Turk revolution of 1908; Tatar intellectuals escaping tsarist oppressionbrought their pan-Turkist ideas to the Ottoman empire, where they gainedconsiderable influence within the CUP.

Among the diversity of movements surveyed in this chapter, a number ofcommon patterns emerge. The dominant intellectual currents within each of themovements saw themselves as progressive forces that would lead their nations tomodernity by building on the most valuable aspects of their historical heritages.Some embraced Western liberalism while others contrasted Western materialismwith their own culture’s supposed spiritual and communal values, but they wereall determined to raise their peoples to Western standards of political cohesive-ness and material success by infusing them with an awareness of, and sense ofpride in, their own distinctive heritages.75

Each of these nationalist projects, then, had to contend with an inner tensionbetween the celebration of the past and the striving for a better future, betweenthe cult of Self and the imitation of the Other, between the idealization of thenation’s intrinsic qualities and the commitment to transform it into somethingbetter – or to help it realize its full potential, as a nationalist might prefer to putit. This tension manifested itself in a marked tendency to define national identi-ties in broad, sweeping terms that transcended existing boundaries, be theypolitical, cultural, or even linguistic. Masaryk insisted that Czechs and Slovakswere part of a Czechoslovak people, a portion of the Croat and Serb intelli-gentsias articulated a Yugoslavist program, the Young Turks embraced wildlyunrealistic pan-Turkist ideals. Many socialist nationalists synthesized ethnicparticularism with proletarian (or peasant) internationalism, and aspired tocreate broad federations of autonomous nations. The political and ethical impli-cations of these programs ranged the full breadth of the spectrum from racistexclusivism to liberal pluralism, but their one common feature was their incorpo-ration of transformative agendas that were ostensibly rooted in the unique


essence of their respective nations. The full realization and expression ofnational identity was a goal to be achieved; the nation was not simply a pre-existing object of worship, it was a process of becoming. Of course, it was theintelligentsias that were to lead the masses to the realization of their nationaldestinies.

At a personal level, these ambitious constructions of national identity wereoften expressive of nationalist intellectuals’ struggles to reconcile their relativelyworldly, or even cosmopolitan, outlooks with their quest for a sense of rooted-ness. It is striking how many of these figures were themselves of mixed ethnicbackground, or had suffered from a sense of cultural or social marginalization.Masaryk was part Slovak, Piłsudski saw himself as an heir to thePolish–Lithuanian tradition, Ziya Gökalp had some Kurdish background in hisfamily, and the assumed name of another prominent Turkish nationalist publicist– Tekin Alp – was a substitute for his rather unlikely given name – MoïseCohen.76 For these people, articulating transformative visions of nationalism wasa way of taking an active hand in the creation of communities to which theycould unambiguously belong.

While transformative impulses were common to all nationalists, many nation-alist intelligentsias were deeply divided over how to balance and integrate thecivic and ethnic dimensions of collective identity. Masaryk’s Realists, theYugoslav activists, the PPS, the liberal wing of the CUP, among others, allemphasized shared political values as cardinal attributes of national community.The leadership of each of these movements regarded its own ethnic group’sculture and language (Czech, Croatian, Polish, Turkish) as a medium for thedissemination of progressive, universal values among the population of theethnic group itself as well as among culturally, linguistically, and/or historicallyrelated nationalities (Slovaks, Serbs, Ukrainians, Kurds and Arabs, respectively).The articulators of these programs tended to be blind to the discriminatorypotential or cultural-imperialist implications of their own ostensibly tolerant andegalitarian philosophies.

Such political programs were often challenged by alternative constructions ofnational identity that unapologetically and unambiguously stressed the priorityof ethnic bonds over civic values. To varying degrees, Kramář’s Young Czechs,the Croatian Party of Pure Right, the Polish Endecja, and the Turkish national-ists and pan-Turkists – among others – envisioned the creation of politicalcommunities whose values, structures, and institutions would be a direct expres-sion of their own people’s idiosyncratic character, in which civic identity wouldsimply function as the public expression of ethnic kinship. The leaders of thesemovements were usually quite frank about their ethnocentrism and outspokenabout their intolerance toward minorities. At the same time, they were disingen-uous in their self-portrayal as mere mouthpieces for the spirit, traditions, andhistory of their peoples. These intellectuals’ programs were in fact no less trans-formative (perhaps, indeed, more so) than those of their opponents, and theproclivity of some among them for pan-nationalism was an expression of theireagerness for a radical reconfiguration of existing mentalities and communities.


The intelligentsias that nourished these conflicting aspirations all greeted theoutbreak of war in 1914 as an opportunity to put words into action and torealize their ideological visions. But the war did more than affect the fate ofintellectuals and the evolution of their ideas; it transformed and disfigured thefaces of entire societies. The following chapter focusses on the development ofnational identities under the direct impact of total war.


The First World War was a total war on an unprecedented scale, and no segmentof the population in the multinational empires could entirely escape its impact.The military fronts in Eastern Europe cut wide swaths of destruction, massacre,rape, and pillage as they moved to and fro across vast lands like the sickle in thehands of the Grim Reaper. In many of those regions of Eastern Europe and theMiddle East that were largely spared the direct wrath of the sword, the scepterof imperial administration took on a hard new edge as military institutionsencroached on, or replaced, the authority of civil administrations. Massconscription, the shock of battle and the esprit de corps of combat, the death andmaiming of loved ones, the requisitioning of property, shortages and rationing ofthe most basic commodities, the induction of women into workforces, foreignconquest and military occupation, the outflow and influx of refugees – in theseand other ways, the war impinged directly and brutally on most sectors ofsociety. The trauma of the war experience made even people of the leasteducated classes and remotest regions realize that their daily existence wasbound up with politics in ways they might not previously have dreamedpossible.1

But to say that everyone was affected by the war is not to suggest that thenature of the experience or the types of responses it evoked were fundamentallysimilar across the board. The war’s impact on people’s mentalities and identitieschanged dramatically over time and varied greatly among different regions,cultures, age groups, sexes, and classes – not to speak of the differences betweenfront-line fighters and civilians. Following the initial outbreak of mass euphoriaand patriotic solidarity among the urban populations of all the major belliger-ents during the first days and weeks of the conflict, experiences, perspectives,and reactions began to diverge ever more sharply.

One such pattern of divergence divided subject peoples from dominantnationalities and imperial political elites within the multinational empires. Thesense that this endless, draining war was being fought in the interests of the lattergroups heightened the collective sense of alienation among the former, as did theever more widespread belief that the burden of war was being divided unfairlyamong them. In many instances, these perceptions reinforced myths of nationalmartyrdom and awakened messianic expectations of collective deliverance.

4 Straining the ImperialMolds, 1914–1918

At the same time, it must be stressed that the war’s impact on individualethnic groups was itself far from homogeneous. By 1918, the rhetoric andimagery of national liberation had become a widespread medium for the expres-sion of political resentments and aspirations across a broad spectrum of socialsectors within many of these peoples. Yet rather than constituting a commonpolitical coinage, nationalism was to assume the form of a multiplicity ofdenominations whose exchange value was open to question. What were theconcrete political and economic implications of national self-determination?Which groups would deserve most credit for achieving it? Who was best posi-tioned to benefit from it? These were unresolved questions, questions that hadthe potential to be enormously divisive precisely because the language of nation-alism raised such high expectations of social solidarity and collective salvation.The answers to such questions, and even the nature of the issues being raised,varied from group to group. Within any given nationality, there were soldiers inimperial armies, volunteers for national legions serving under “enemy”command, middle-class civilians, displaced persons, industrial workers, peasants,domestic political leaders who continued to profess loyalty to the imperialregimes well into the war, and exiled nationalist politicians dedicated to thedismantling of empires, to name but a few categories of action and experience.The range of political and social agendas that had to be reconciled with oneanother within the framework of “national unity” after 1918 was, therefore,extraordinarily wide.

This chapter will use a selection of cases to explore the range of influencesthe war had on conceptions of identity among members of subject nationalities2

within the ever more strained frameworks of the multinational empires. Thefollowing chapter will focus on new, wartime arenas of nationalist activity andconsciousness that lay outside established imperial frameworks.

War Front, Home Front, and the Politicization ofEthnicity in the Habsburg Empire

In the Habsburg empire, the outbreak of war was the occasion for fervent affir-mations of loyalty on the part of mainstream political leaders in Galicia,Croatia, Slovenia, Bohemia, etc. Indeed, it was hoped that a resolute display ofwartime loyalty to the crown would earn its reward in the form of greater oppor-tunities for self-rule after the war. Yet the fact that there was a perceived need toproclaim loyalty to the monarch is itself indicative both of the archaic politicalculture of the Habsburg state, and of its potential incohesiveness.

Massive casualties on the Russian front combined with the enormouseconomic toll of the war effort did ultimately strain the loyalty of both dominantand subject nationalities. Austria–Hungary presented the incongruous spectacleof a dynastic state fighting a total war; the war’s demands were such as could besustained for the duration only by a state that could inspire its populace with asense that its national destiny was at stake in the conflict. In the context of theHabsburg empire, this notion might have been vaguely plausible for the

Straining the Imperial Molds, 1914–1918 71

Magyars, but insofar as the conflict intensified their sense of a distinct nationaldestiny, it reinforced their alienation from the imperial edifice whose baseremained in Vienna. Indeed, the Hungarian government withheld grain suppliesfrom the Austrian half of the monarchy while accusing the Habsburg military ofsquandering Magyar lives in disproportionate numbers on the front lines.3 As forthe Austro-Germans, whatever strengthening of nationalist sentiments theyexperienced not only worsened their conflicts with Czechs and Magyars, but alsoaggravated the tension between the pan-German ideal and loyalty to theHabsburg state. Berlin, after all, was a far more powerful magnet for Germannationalist emotions than was Vienna.

Among many of the other ethnic groups, nationalist feelings were directlyassociated with sympathy for the Allied cause. To be sure, there were manypeople of all nationalities who did feel a sense of personal devotion to the elderlypatriarch, Kaiser Franz Joseph (reigned 1848–1916), who ruled over the empire.They may have valued the Austro-Hungarian state as a source of stability andthe rule of law. The Poles and Jews of Galicia looked to Vienna for protectionagainst what they saw as the barbarous hordes of the Russian army. But a regimethat explicitly and necessarily distanced itself from any modern conception ofnational identity was by definition incapable of igniting that spark of collectivezeal that helps a population endure the privations and brutal demands of a totalwar.

Russia’s Brusilov offensive in the summer of 1916 cost the Austro-Hungarianarmy 750,000 men (over half of them as POWs) before the German army’sintervention forced the Russians to retreat in disarray. The Dual Monarchy wasleft more subservient than ever to Berlin in its prosecution of the war effort, as itsubmitted to the creation of a joint military command in which the Germanscalled the tune.4 In November 1916, the joint Habsburg–German proclamationof a Polish kingdom on territory captured from Russia briefly raised hopesamong the Habsburg empire’s Slavs for the incorporation of an autonomousPoland in a Habsburg state reconfigured as an ethnic federation. These hopesfaded as the new Polish entity turned out to be little more than a façade forGerman hegemony. Finally, Franz Joseph’s death (also in November 1916) after asixty-eight-year reign removed from the scene a figure that had embodied theimages of dynastic legitimacy and dignified paternalism that were so central toAustro-Hungarian patriotism.5

The new emperor, Karl I, recognized that the state bequeathed to him was intoo brittle a condition to contend with the pressures of the war. He made over-tures to the Slavic nationalities by overtly raising the possibility of a devolution ofpower to them. The Reichsrat was reconvened in May 1917 after a three-yearhiatus. Karl also used private channels to explore the possibility of negotiating aseparate peace with the Allies.

When premature public disclosure led to the unraveling of his secret diplo-matic contacts in the spring of 1918, Karl found himself more vulnerable thanever to the demands and pressures of his resentful German ally. For their part,with the prospect eliminated of luring the Habsburg empire away from the war

72 Straining the Imperial Molds, 1914–1918

effort, the Allied powers felt they had nothing to lose by promoting its dissolu-tion, and began openly endorsing the idea of full independence for itsnationalities.6 On the domestic front, the reconvened Reichsrat served onceagain as a forum for Czech–German confrontation rather than reconciliation.An increasingly fragile and polarized Habsburg state found itself unable toderive much benefit from Germany’s defeat of Russia in 1917, as widespreadmutinies and massive desertions plagued its army. In October 1918, with Alliedvictory on the Western Front imminent, Karl’s last-minute offer of self-rule tothe nationalities of the Austrian half of the empire was seen as a sign of weak-ness rather than magnanimity. The leaders of subject peoples throughout themonarchy responded by proclaiming the independence (or the adherence toneighboring, co-ethnic nation-states) of their respective regions, leaving Austriaand Hungary as defeated rump states stranded in the midst of a transformedCentral European political map.

To what extent and in what ways was this gradual corrosion and final, suddencollapse of the Austro-Hungarian state connected to mass-based nationalismamong its peoples? One can, at a minimum, plausibly assert that the monarchyfailed to maintain the allegiance of significant sectors among regional elites andmasses, leaving the field open for small but determined groups of separatistleaders. But can one go further and suggest that the war fostered the growth ofan active anti-imperial animus among the general public, stimulating the devel-opment of nationalist sentiments that were incompatible with the continuedexistence of the Habsburg monarchy? The answer is elusive, because the rele-vant source material is relatively sparse. We have at our disposal volumes ofcollected writings and speeches by political leaders and ideologues; most otherpeople were much less concerned with recording their changing attitudes andmentalities. Nevertheless, by combing through soldiers’ letters from the front,military records, contemporaneous newspaper accounts, police reports on publicgatherings, and records of court proceedings, and by making plausible inferencesfrom the actions and demands of strikers, mutineers, deserters, demonstrators,resistance bands, and local political leaders, historians have been able to developworking hypotheses about changes in political consciousness across classes andregions during the war years.

In most cases, ethnicity played a powerful role in mediating wartime experi-ences, while war, in turn, shaped the construction of national identities. Thesepatterns in the development of social and political consciousness were far fromuniform, however. By focussing selectively on three distinct yet related arenas ofactivity – the Habsburg military, the Czech home front, and the South Slavhome front – we can develop a sense of the range of responses to the war amongmembers of the empire’s subject nationalities.

Loyalties on the (Front) Line

As one of the last all-imperial institutions of the post-1867 Dual Monarchy, theAustro-Hungarian army held a significance beyond that of providing for the


security and defense of the state. It was a powerful public symbol of imperialunity as well as an instrument of interethnic integration.7 Its ability to maintaininternal cohesion was therefore doubly essential as the Habsburg empire took onthe fateful challenge of total war. By the same token, any centrifugal pressureswithin its ranks would likely have a powerful ripple effect extending beyond themilitary realm into the political sphere.8

By most accounts, the army performed surprisingly well in the war, given theenormous strains it was under. That is to say, in view of its multiethnic characterand its state of relative underequipment, it is remarkable how long the armyremained a functioning institution.9 Although it was not able to achieve decisivevictory on any front without direct assistance from Germany, it was able tomount some punishing offensives in the Italian sector and to maintain an effec-tive defense there until September 1918. The army’s most cohesive element wasits officer corps, which was one of the most ethnicity-blind institutions left in themonarchy; although just over half of those who chose to become career officerswere ethnic Germans, promotions appear to have been determined much moreon the basis of merit than of nationality.10 Officers were themselves usually thesons of civil servants, who would likely have moved from one part of the empireto another with their families as they were posted to various provinces over thecourse of their careers. This typical background of geographic mobility duringchildhood combined with the ethos of military education prevented most officersfrom getting caught up in the progressive ethnicization of identity that wasgnawing at the monarchy’s foundations in the years leading up to and during thewar. The overriding loyalty of the typical officer was still directed toward hisregiment and toward the Emperor-King, to whom he had taken a personal oathof loyalty.11

Among the rank-and-file conscripts, the sense of corporate identity and tradi-tion was much weaker. Habsburg soldiers, most of whom were peasants, couldbe relied upon to obey orders and to help maintain domestic law and order: theywere routinely stationed away from their native provinces as part of a consciousdivide-and-rule approach to the nationalities problem. Many of them do seem tohave felt a sense of loyalty toward the Emperor-King. But when it came to therigors of the war, their performance was often shabby and their morale poor. Itwas only on the Italian front that any degree of enthusiasm for the struggle couldbe discerned among the uniformed masses, for the entry of Italy (a former ally)into the conflict on the Entente side was seen as a stab in the monarchy’s backand Italy’s annexationist designs on South Slav territories were successfullyexploited by Austrian propaganda among Croats and Slovenes.12

The performance and morale of the rank-and-file was hardly helped by thefact that most of the soldiers who entered the war in 1914 were killed, maimed,or captured in its first two years. By 1916, the youths of 1914 had largely beenreplaced by raw conscripts and reserve formations that had been hastily calledup to satisfy the war machine’s insatiable appetite. Insufficiently prepared andinadequately clothed and fed, this rag-tag force could hardly take much comfortfrom the fact that the Russian army was even more run down. The Austro-


Hungarian victory over the Italians at the Battle of Caporetto in September1917 was the Habsburg army’s last hurrah; from that point on, its decline wasrapid.

The increasing sense of disdain among common soldiers for the pompousHabsburg autocracy, and their growing impatience with the harsh demands ofmilitary discipline, is best captured in the Czech author Jaroslav Hašek’s farcicalnovel, The Good Soldier Švejk. The story’s Czech anti-hero spends the warthreading himself through every available bureaucratic loophole and takingadvantage of all possible opportunities for shirking his duties and avoidingcombat, all the while maintaining an outward air of innocent simplicity.13

Indeed, many of those who fought in Austrian uniform did so half-heartedly, andin April 1915, Austrian authorities were shocked by the surrender to theRussians of almost the entire 2,000-man 28th Infantry Regiment from Bohemia,under circumstances that seemed suggestive of desertion to the enemy. This regi-ment, many of whose soldiers were industrial workers affiliated with theRussophile National Socialist Party, was one of two formations that had flam-boyantly protested being sent to fight against fellow Slavs upon their departurefrom Prague seven months earlier. The regiment’s commitment to the war efforthad not been strengthened by its experience while stationed in Hungary, wherethe hostile attitude of the local Magyar population had confirmed the feelingthat Austria–Hungary, not Russia, was the true enemy of the Czech people.14

Among the South Slavs in Habsburg military service, Serb troops were partic-ularly prone to desert or defect to the enemy (especially on the Serbian andRussian fronts),15 and the longer the war lasted, the more such incidents multi-plied among Slovenes and Croats as well. But it was units posted in the rear –where relative inactivity contributed to low morale and contact with civilianpopulations sensitized troops to changes in the political atmosphere – that weremost prone to challenge authority. Reserve units, composed largely of menexempted from front-line service by virtue of their status as university students,priests, or schoolteachers, were particularly fertile ground for the cultivation ofrevolutionary and nationalist ideas. Those considered unfit or troublemakerswere also consigned to these and other rearguard units, which contributed to thepoor discipline and rebellious proclivities of such formations. During early 1918,mutinies dominated by South Slav sailors broke out aboard the Austro-Hungarian fleet that lay idle off the coast of Dalmatia. Although suppressed,they were soon followed by a string of rebellions among South Slav ground unitsposted in Croatia–Slavonia, Dalmatia, and Bosnia – units that now included tensof thousands of former POWs freshly released from captivity in Russia, wherethey had witnessed the revolutionary transformation of army and society.Declining food rations helped precipitate such revolts, but they almost invariablytook on a heavily political coloration. Rebel agendas usually reflected a mixtureof social-revolutionary and nationalist aspirations: pro-Bolshevik slogans werechanted alongside cries such as “Long live Yugoslavia!” or “Long live theSlovenes!”

While individual mutinies in the rear could be forcefully suppressed, by


October 1918 – in the wake of an unsuccessful Habsburg offensive on the Piaveriver in June – even troops on the Italian front had lost all inclination to fight onin a hopeless cause. Magyar units now deserted the trenches as readily as Slavsoldiers did. As the Habsburg monarchy’s imminent demise became apparent,that last redoubt of dynastic loyalty – the officer corps – finally disintegrated aswell, as a majority of officers placed themselves at the disposal of the nationalcommittees that were springing up in their native regions.16

What does the above narrative tell us about the role of nationalism in theAustro-Hungarian army? In and of itself, of course, soldiers’ reluctance to die inbattle or languish in barracks need not be taken as a symptom of separatistnationalism. The French command faced a large-scale mutiny on the WesternFront in 1917, and ethnic Russian troops in the tsar’s army were not much moreeager to fight than those of other nationalities.17 The cataclysm that was theGreat War took its toll on every army’s stamina, cohesiveness, and discipline.Conversely, it is accepted wisdom among military historians that the sense ofcamaraderie within a military unit is much more important than patriotism insustaining morale and discipline under the extreme pressures of war. Whenconfronting the imminent possibility of a horrific death, the combatants’ esprit decorps and immediacy of contact become a much more vital dimension of theirexperience than any broader identification with an “imagined community”possibly could be.18

What is misleading about this generalization is that it ignores the possiblerelationship between the two frames of reference. Patriotism clearly is not a suffi-cient condition of discipline among troops, but the nature of their politicalloyalties can play a vital role in defining the common goal toward which theydirect their esprit de corps. A common resentment of the Austro-Hungarian stateand army colored the group spirit of military units such as the Czech 28thInfantry Regiment that readily surrendered to the Russians in April 1915. It canbe argued that the internal cohesion of such formations did not break down atall; rather, their collective behavior was reshaped by their nationalconsciousness.19 The case of the French mutinies of 1917 was qualitatively verydifferent. Here, discipline broke down, but fundamental patriotic assumptionsremained intact. The demands of these soldiers centered on immediate concernssuch as insufficient leave from the front lines, abusive behavior on the part ofofficers, inedible rations, etc. Their calls for immediate peace talks took it forgranted that the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France would have to be part of afinal settlement. The overall righteousness of the French war effort does notseem to have been widely called into question, and there were certainly no massdesertions to the enemy.20

It is clear that there was a considerable degree of correlation between ethno-cultural consciousness and differential desertion rates in the Habsburg army.Soldiers of Slavic nationality deserted in higher proportions than did ethnicGermans or Magyars (although by the last months of the war, desertion rateswere skyrocketing among these groups as well). Slavic troops were also muchlikelier to desert on the Russian and Serbian fronts than on the Italian front.


Conversely, ethnically Italian troops (from Austrian-ruled South Tyrol and theDalmatian coast) deserted in disproportionately high numbers on the Italianfront.21 These patterns suggest that a sense of ethnic affiliation with the enemyundermined some soldiers’ loyalty to the empire. It can be conjectured that, forevery soldier who took the risky initiative of deserting, there were several otherswho did not have the opportunity to do so, but nonetheless resented being forcedto engage in mortal combat against counterparts whom they did not regard asenemies.22

Disaffection with the Austro-Hungarian cause was particularly rife amongthose soldiers who ended up as prisoners in Russia. In the summer of 1918, afew months after the signing of peace treaties with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk, the Bolsheviks began to release hundreds of thousands of German andHabsburg prisoners of war. As soon as these men had returned home, many ofthem found themselves thrust right back into uniforms and sent off to newfronts. If nothing else had politicized them, this did. Having languished in campsand suffered severe privations for years, these men were hardly eager to be recy-cled into cannon fodder upon their long-awaited return to their native lands.Moreover, having been in Russia during the revolutionary turmoil of1917–1918,23 they had become prone to question authority and keenly aware ofthe possibilities of employing mass action to challenge the existing order. FormerPOWs played leading roles in inciting mutinies and rebellions in the Austro-Hungarian army during the summer and fall of 1918, and contributed to thedisintegration of law and order in some regions. It was also from the ranks ofPOWs in Russia that the main contingents of volunteers for Czech and SouthSlav nationalist legions were recruited (see Chapter 5).24

In brief, the army’s performance in the war encapsulated both the strengthsand the vulnerabilities of the Habsburg empire. For most of the war, themajority of troops took the empire’s existence – and their obligation to fight forit – for granted. Yet – except on the Italian front – members of subject nationali-ties did not generally feel that in doing their duty toward the Emperor-King theywere also protecting any vital interest of their own people. Indeed, the militarycommand did not even make a serious effort to instill such feelings in thetroops.25 The Habsburg army’s cohesion had always revolved around loyalty tothe person of the monarch; ethnic identity and regional attachments were seenas things to be left behind when one entered the ranks. An eleventh-hour effortinitiated in March 1918 by military counterintelligence to systematize the patri-otic education (Vaterländischer Unterricht) of the troops proved hopelessly inept in itsheavy reliance on didactic brochures and lectures and woefully traditional in itsrigid focus on the value of the Habsburg state and the benevolence andpeaceloving nature of its ruler. Pamphlets distributed among the war-weary,embittered soldiers included such pithy gems as: “Only a fair monarch worthy oflove and above all party infighting can ensure that everyone receives an equalshare of rights and goods.”26

This sort of propaganda campaign could only serve to reinforce the sense ofalienation among the rank-and-file. Indeed, the Hungarian authorities, who did


seek to instill a sense of nationalist ardor among Magyar troops, openly opposedthis last-ditch effort at reviving their supranational, dynastic loyalties; theunifying principle of the Habsburg army had become an anachronism.Emperor-King Karl’s last-minute attempt at the end of October 1918 to strike anew bargain with Hungarian nationalism by releasing Magyar troops from theiroath of personal loyalty to him only accelerated the influx of Magyar soldiersinto the multinational stream of deserters flowing away from the front lines. Inthe Habsburg empire’s final hour, all its nationalities were as one in their deter-mination to abandon it.27

In the final analysis, the multiethnic makeup of the Habsburg army was notthe major cause of its military failure: the largely peasant composition of thearmed forces, inadequate logistics, the inability of the Habsburg economy tosustain a total war effort, and the final collapse of Austria–Hungary’s Germanally were the determining factors. But the demoralization associated with thiswar effort, the disillusionment under these conditions with the notion ofpersonal fealty to the person of the monarch, and the failure of the Habsburgauthorities to create an alternative framework of collective motivation, all helpedundermine loyalty to the empire among the troops. If only by default, ethnicidentity emerged as the most appealing frame of reference for mutinous anddeserting soldiers. In other words, ethnic identities did not in themselves causeHabsburg defeat, but the approach of defeat did stimulate the disintegration ofthe army along ethno-national lines. Without the continued cohesion of thearmy as both symbol and enforcer of imperial unity, there was nothing left tohold the Austro-Hungarian state together. For the final years of the conflict hadalso led to dramatic developments on the home front, as the following two caseswill illustrate.

The Czech Home Front

Although the Czechs’ open defiance of Habsburg authority was to play animportant role in the disintegration of the empire as a whole, it was not until1917–1918 that a determined nationalist spirit manifested itself on a consistentand concerted basis. During the first two-and-a-half years of the war, the activityof the mainstream Czech political parties lacked the focussed intensity ofMasaryk’s political endeavors in exile (see Chapter 5). It is true that a number ofleaders who remained in Prague entertained hopes of liberation by Russia or ofan internal collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. With this in mind, KarelKramář and Vaclav Klofáč – the Russophile heads of the Young Czech andNational Socialist28 parties, respectively – were secretly in communication withthe Russian government, while the Agrarian Party chief, Antonín Švehla,pursued a dual-track policy of maintaining contact with radical nationalists inexile and at home while concurrently acting within the legitimate framework ofAustrian politics. But to risk all in an overt challenge to Habsburg authorityseemed like a foolhardy proposition even to these figures. Others, such as theleaders of the Catholic parties, either retained an active sense of loyalty to the


monarchy, or had grown used to working within the system and were reluctant toabandon their complacency. In general, hope continued to focus on the possi-bility of attaining self-rule for the historic Czech lands within the framework of areformed Habsburg empire. A secret steering committee of radical nationalistsknown as the Maffie had been set up by Masaryk’s associate Edvard Benešbefore the latter’s departure from the country, but its influence did not manifestitself until 1917.29

During the first year of the war, the imprisonment of Kramář, Klofáč, andother nationalists suspected of subversion and contact with the enemy, and theimposition of brutal military rule on parts of the Czech provinces of Bohemiaand Moravia that were adjacent to Galicia, cast doubt on the possibility ofconstructive dialogue with Vienna. On the other hand, the jailing of the mostconfrontational leaders of the mainstream political parties left more accommo-dating figures at the forefront of Czech politics. Until 1917, therefore, theseparties remained quite cautious, if not timid, in their dealings with the authori-ties, and reluctant to heed the exiles’ calls for confrontation and resistance.

Emperor Karl’s November 1916 announcement that the Reichsrat would bereconvened in May of the following year, combined with his amnesty for politicalprisoners, initially seemed to vindicate the position of those Czech leaders whohad insisted on keeping open the lines of communication with the government.New life seemed to have been breathed into Czech “activism” – the term used todescribe working actively within the system to bring about meaningful reform.The main threat to Czech interests was seen as coming not from the Habsburgmonarchy itself, but from the ethnic-German party bloc. These Austro-German30 nationalists had been emboldened by the outbreak of the war and thesuspension of that circus of ethnic diversity, the Reichsrat, to press for outrightpolitical and ethno-linguistic domination of the western half of the monarchy.Now that the Reichsrat was being reconvened, the Czech parties perceived anopportunity to redress the political balance and put an end to the Austro-German bloc’s behind-the-scenes intrigues. Such was the faith many Czechleaders continued to vest in the basic integrity of supranational Habsburg insti-tutions.

With a view to creating a cohesive parliamentary opposition to the Austro-German initiatives, the main Czech political parties organized themselves into aCzech Union as well as an extra-parliamentary coordinating council known asthe Czech National Committee (to be renamed the Czechoslovak NationalCommittee in July 1918). The two main socialist parties – the Social Democratsand National Socialists – created their own joint council dedicated to the repre-sentation of working-class interests, but without questioning the overall authorityof the National Committee, in which they were full participants. The CzechUnion also established close coordination of parliamentary tactics with theSouth Slav bloc.

Focussing on cooperating with the imperial government rather than disputingits authority, the Czech Union embarrassed Tomáš Masaryk by publicly repudi-ating the Allies’ January 1917 espousal of Czechoslovak national liberation as a


war aim. By the end of May, however, in the wake of the March revolution inRussia and the United States’ entry into the war in April, a radicalization hadoccurred in the Czech Union’s position. The statement delivered by the Union atthe opening session of the Reichsrat was a much closer approximation of thepro-independence position articulated by the exiled nationalists (see Chapter 5).It claimed the right to self-government for both Czechs and Slovaks within asingle political framework, and in so doing it referred not only to Bohemia andMoravia’s historic rights, but to the revolutionary principle of national self-deter-mination for the Czech and Slovak peoples. Lip service was still paid to the ideaof achieving this objective through a reorganization of the Habsburg state, butthe shift toward a separatist mindset was unmistakable. In January 1918, theCzech Union issued an even more brazen statement in favor of the generalapplication of the principle of national self-determination, without referring atall to the continued existence of the Austro-Hungarian state. Such Czech initia-tives fanned the flames of South Slav separatism in turn.

As Austria–Hungary drifted into ever greater dependence on Germany andever worse military and economic straits, the credibility of the old “activist”policy was completely undermined. “Activist” party leaders were stigmatized aslittle better than collaborators and removed from positions of authority. Theinfluence of the Maffie (and through it, of the exiled Masaryk and Beneš)increased across the Czech political spectrum. Even the Czech SocialDemocratic Party had forced its leader Bohumir Šmeral out of office as early asSeptember 1917. An ardent internationalist, Šmeral had consistently espousedthe view that socialism did not have realistic prospects in the region if the largeeconomic unit of Austria–Hungary were to be broken up into independentnation-states. He was ousted by radical nationalists who rejected the old Austro-Marxist program of cultural autonomy for the nationalities, and who joinedforces with the “bourgeois” parties in the campaign for full-fledged national self-determination. For his part, Šmeral went on to become one of the founders ofthe Czechoslovak Communist Party. By October 1918, as the state’s authoritycollapsed on all sides, the Czechoslovak National Committee peacefully tookover administrative responsibilities in Bohemia and Moravia and proclaimed thecountry’s independence.

This, then, is the basic chronology of political events leading up to thecreation of Czechoslovakia. The question is, in what ways was this processrelated to the war’s impact on the wider Czech public?

There is no indication that, as of 1914, the Czech public was any more intenton gaining national independence than its political leaders were. Greaterautonomy within the framework of a federalized Habsburg monarchy probablyrepresented the closest thing to a consensus objective, support for which cutacross Czech social sectors and regional divisions. But to accept the possibleutility of a reformed Habsburg monarchy was one thing; to die for an unre-formed Austro-Hungarian empire in a war against fellow Slavs from Serbia andRussia was quite another. The reports of the Governor of Bohemia inSeptember 1914 contained accounts of drunken conscripts in Prague tottering


off to the front flaunting the Czech national colors and waving a red bannerasking why they were being sent to fight the Russians, while sympathetic crowdsurged them not to shoot at their Slavic brothers.31

Such early outbursts of discontent were soon suppressed, as the Habsburgauthorities suspended civil liberties throughout the empire, arrested nationalistleaders, and restored a semblance of order and discipline on the home front.With the passage of years, however, the economic ravages of total war took asteady toll on public morale. Suffering acutely from the British blockade of theCentral Powers, the Habsburg monarchy found itself increasingly hard put toprovide adequate food and fuel for its civilian population. The army’s needs hadto come first, and basic supplies such as bread and coal were rationed ever moretightly. Bohemia was the economic powerhouse of the empire, containing over70 per cent of its heavy industry (including the vast Skoda arms-productioncomplex in Plzen [Pilsen]). Yet by the summer of 1918, the government was ableto supply the residents of this vital region with only 45 per cent of their alreadymeager official flour ration of 165 grams a day.

The evolution of wartime public opinion among the Habsburg empire’ssubject nationalities has been studied by Péter Hanák, whose work is based onthousands of letters collected by the postal censors over the course of theconflict. Hanák has concluded that the war’s hardships accentuated the lowerclasses’ dichotomized view of society as divided between rich and poor, andbetween willful authorities and hapless subjects. The rich could afford to buyscarce goods on the black market, to evade (so it was thought) military service,and to wield influence with the authorities. The poor were objects of conscrip-tion, requisitioning, and rationing. In the many instances where class and ethnicdistinctions largely coincided with one another, resentment of the rich andpowerful meant, by definition, resentment of another ethnic group – thus indi-rectly reinforcing the oppressed group’s own sense of ethnic distinctiveness.

In the case of the Czechs, class and ethnicity were not coextensive, as theylargely were in the case of “peasant peoples” like the Ruthenians (UniateUkrainians of Galicia) or Slovaks. There were fully developed Czech middle andupper-middle classes, a large and well-organized Czech industrial working class,as well as a relatively well-off and economically sophisticated Czech peasantstratum. In this case, therefore, it cannot be taken for granted that heightenedawareness of socio-economic and national identities under the impact of warwould be mutually reinforcing; there was the potential for conflict between thetwo forms of identity. As the hardships of war provoked them into more activepolitical engagement, the Czech masses had to decide whether the primarypurpose of that engagement was to confront the propertied classes generally,regardless of ethnicity, or their non-Czech rulers specifically.

That national loyalties generally took precedence over class conflict amongthe Czechs was due in part to patterns and perceptions of power distributionamong the ethnic groups of the empire. For example, the population’s bitternessover the acute food shortages described above was aggravated by the continuedexport of grain from the Czech lands to Germany throughout much of the war,


and by persistent rumors that the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy wasrefusing to share its more plentiful agricultural supplies with the western half ofthe empire.32 This highlighted the external dependence of the Habsburg crownon Germany and its internal weakness vis-à-vis the Magyars. It was indeedincreasingly clear that Habsburg survival in this all-or-nothing conflict dependedon German victory, and that such a victory would leave Germany as the undis-puted hegemon of Europe generally, and East Central Europe particularly. Thisemboldened the pan-German parties in the Reichsrat in their own bid fordomestic political hegemony, while the Hungarian government looked forwardto even greater freedom to determine its own affairs – and disregard the interestsof Slovaks, Croats, and others – under a weakened Habsburg crown. The polit-ical future of the empire’s Slavic peoples looked dim indeed, were the CentralPowers’ arms to prevail. The material difficulties experienced daily by the Czechmasses thus assumed a very well-defined political dimension in their minds, asthey reinforced the pre-existing perception that the Habsburg empire’s Slavswere consistently oppressed and exploited by the Germans and Magyars.Inadequate rations were seen not just as a function of the war in general, but asthe more particular consequence of ethnic inequality in Austria–Hungary.

The politicization of Czech economic resentments thus took on a nationalistrather than social revolutionary character from the beginning. The bread riotsand looting sprees that broke out periodically in Czech cities did not indiscrimi-nately target all stores or all people who were seen as prosperous; they weredirected primarily at German and Jewish merchants and shopkeepers. (The Jewsof Prague were usually Germanized, rather than Czechified, in language andculture.) The strikes that engulfed industrial centers in Bohemia tended to beassociated with demands for national self-determination at least as much as withcalls for social revolution. After all, the authorities who had led society into thiscatastrophe in the first place were not leaders of the Czech middle or upperclasses; they were drawn primarily from the German and Magyar elites. The warmade the relative powerlessness of the Czechs within the Habsburg system moretangible than ever before. The nation as a whole was seen as oppressed byoutsiders, and resentments over the economic disaster were therefore channeledinto a heightened sense of nationalist consciousness.

This trend was reinforced by the Czech cultural establishment, which adoptedan ever more defiant anti-Habsburg stance during the last two years of the war,when the liberalization under Emperor Karl made relatively bold gesturespossible. In May 1917, 222 writers signed a manifesto drafted by Jaroslav Kvapil,artistic director of the National Theater in Prague, calling for a completerestoration of constitutional liberties in the Habsburg empire. This helped bringpressure on the Czech political leadership (organized in the Czech Union) torevise the cravenly loyalist public stance it had adopted at the beginning of theyear (see above). In May of the following year, the fiftieth anniversary of theNational Theater’s founding was the occasion for a cultural festival attended bynumerous delegates from the Slavic regions of the empire, whose rousingspeeches called into question the continued legitimacy of Habsburg rule.


The picture that emerges is of a broad convergence of social, cultural, andideological currents in a common national-democratic stream that rapidlygained force over the final year and a half of the war and that obliged theleaders of political parties to keep pace with it or face marginalization. Thecontrast between Czech and Austro-German socio-political radicalism duringthe war is quite revealing. January 1918 witnessed the outbreak of a massivestrike movement in Vienna and other Austrian–German cities, which soonspread to Hungary as well. Clearly inspired by the example of the BolshevikRevolution, the striking workers in some cases set up soviets (popular councils) onthe Russian model and articulated their discontent in terms of class conflict andthe need for social revolution. Only through an overthrow of the existing socio-economic and political system, they claimed, could the war be ended rapidly onall fronts. The deployment of seven Habsburg combat divisions was required tosuppress the strikes.33

There was considerable interest in this movement among the Czech workingclass, and the Czech Social Democratic Party officially expressed its sympathyand support for it. But in concrete terms, the Czechs did not contribute verymuch. A one-day sympathy strike was organized in Czech factories toward theend of January, by which time the authorities had already clearly gained controlover the situation in Austria. Only in the industrial outskirts of the Moraviancapital Brno (Brünn) did Czech workers join the strike as soon as it began. TheCzech Social Democratic leadership clearly made a deliberate decision to avoida break with the Czech middle-class parties and to remain a sympatheticbystander rather than become an active participant in the effort to bring aboutan empire-wide social revolution. The composition of the Social Democraticleadership was itself a reflection of shop-floor sentiments and rank-and-file pres-sures that had led to the removal of the committed internationalist Šmeral asparty boss in September 1917, and the consolidation of power by nationalistswithin the movement.

Why did national identity become so fundamental a reference point forCzechs of the working as well as middle classes? Among the socio-politicaldichotomies that Hanák refers to in his analysis of lower-class perceptions arethose between rich and poor, lords and peasants, capitalists and proletariat. Butthe most fundamental dichotomy in the minds of the masses was defined bydisparities in power, rather than in material wealth per se. That is to say, the mate-rial hardships associated with the war did not automatically generate classconflict. Rather, they accentuated the popular distinction between those withpower and those without it.

In the case of the lower classes of the socio-economically differentiated Czechpopulation, the predominant perception was that Germans as a group hadpower, and Czechs as a community did not. It was perfectly clear that it was notthe Czech bourgeoisie that had dragged the country into the war (even if indi-vidual Czech industrialists might be making a profit from military contracts), orthat was shipping grain to Germany. It was the Habsburg state that was arbi-trarily imposing these decisions on Czechs of all classes. The feeling that Czechs


of all classes were victims of Habsburg and German exploitation reinforced thesense of national community that had already been highly developed before thewar. More importantly, it undermined the belief that the nation’s rights could besecured within the framework of the Habsburg monarchy. By 1918 it seemedself-evident to most Czechs that any kind of meaningful social reform could onlybe achieved once the fundamental problem of imperial exploitation had beenresolved for good.

The South Slav Lands

It is much harder to provide a coherent or even sequential account of thewartime evolution of national consciousness among the Habsburg empire’sSouth Slavs. The extensive overlap among the respective territorial distributionsof Serbs, Croats, and Muslims confounded efforts at clearly delineating nationalidentities in the region, as did the deep divisions within ethnic groups betweenurban and rural cultures (most notably among the Croats) and between secular-liberal and clerical-religious elements. Wartime pressures complicated mattersfurther, as Habsburg military and civil authorities vied for control of regions inthe vicinity of the Serbian front and pursued agendas that were at cross-purposes with each other. In a sense, it is precisely this pattern of chaos andfragmentation that constitutes the organizing principle of this narrative: contem-poraneous historical actors may have been almost as confused as latter-dayhistorians about how to make sense of rapidly shifting political circumstancesand wildly fluctuating popular emotions. The war intensified nationalist senti-ments among the South Slav peoples, while further complicating the issue ofwhere to direct those feelings and what would constitute the best cultural andpolitical framework(s) for national self-determination.

The outbreak of the war led to a crackdown on oppositional political activitythroughout the South Slav regions of the empire. The civilian authoritiesretained juridical control of Hungarian-ruled Croatia, but the Habsburg militaryregarded the region as a war zone and felt free to impose “security measures”with impunity. Hundreds of Serb civilians were put to death and many moredeported on the basis of vague or trumped-up charges of espionage. Of course,some Serbs were involved in sabotage networks, and local Serbs in one borderzone welcomed the Serbian army with open arms during its brief incursion intothe region. But the Habsburg military treated the entire Serb population assuspect, taking advantage of its unusual wartime powers to embark on acampaign of terror designed to eradicate any potential for collective politicalaction on the part of the ethnic Serb minority.34 The situation was aggravatedby an anti-Serb backlash among many Croats, who forgot their pro-Serbianenthusiasm of the previous few years (see Chapter 3) and engaged in violentstreet protests and riots in Zagreb (as well as in Dubrovnik and Sarajevo) in thewake of the assassination of Habsburg heir apparent Franz Ferdinand and hiswife at Sarajevo in July 1914. The Croatian nationalists of the Frankist party


enthusiastically endorsed the military’s violent crackdown against the Serbminority; their party organ, Hrvatska (The Croat), observed that “the Serbs arepoisonous snakes from whom you are safe only after you have crushed theirheads.” The most prominent Yugoslavist activists of the Croat–Serb Coalition(HSK) – which was still the largest grouping in the Croatian Sabor (parliament)– were either already in exile in Allied countries, or now managed to make theirway there (see Chapter 5). The HSK was led by Svetozar Pribićević(1875–1936), leader of its Serb wing, who had recently veered back toward anopportunistic defense of Serb collective interest through cooperation with theHungarian government.35 Amidst an outpouring of virulently anti-Serbiangovernment propaganda, the cowed HSK hastily declared its loyalty to theHabsburg state and its unwavering commitment to the cause of military victoryover Serbia and Russia, while desperately seeking the protection of the civilauthorities in Budapest against the depredations of the Habsburg army.36 InAustrian-ruled Dalmatia, public support for Yugoslavism appeared to hold moresteady, but even here this could only be said of the educated, urban middleclasses, whose anti-clericalism and commercial orientation alienated the localpeasantry.37

In Bosnia, whose large Serb population had served as fertile ground for thepro-Serbian Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia) nationalist youth movement in theyears just before 1914, martial law was harshly enforced as soon as the war brokeout. Thousands of suspected activists were interned in prison camps andBosnian Serbs were treated like an enemy population by Habsburg forces underthe command of General Sarkotić, a Croat. Summary military justice was thenorm; hundreds accused of espionage or sabotage were executed with little orno concern for due process. As part of a deliberate divide-and-rule policy, theHabsburg authorities recruited Bosnian Muslims and Croats into a militia – theSchutzkorps (Defense Corps) – charged with suppressing and preempting Serbguerrilla activity. The brutal methods of the Schutzkorps, which included the occa-sional massacre, poured fuel on the flames of the longstanding hostility betweenMuslims and Serbs in Bosnia, and aggravated Croat–Serb resentments.38

The provinces populated by Slovenes were far enough behind the front to bespared extensive administrative interventions by the military, but the Austriancivilian authorities proved harsher in their supervision of Slovene publicationsthan the Hungarian authorities were in their oversight of the Croat press andstage. Indeed, much of Slovene culture was effectively suppressed during the firsttwo years of the war. Newspapers and journals associated with the staunchlyconservative, pro-Habsburg, clerical wing of Slovene politics and culture weregiven free rein to express their views, while the liberal press, which had taken upthe cause of Triune Yugoslavism (advocacy of the creation of a self-governingSouth Slav entity as the third constituent element of a reconfigured Habsurgmonarchy) in the pre-war years, was heavily censored and in many cases alto-gether stifled. Slovene theater life, with its liberal affinities, was also severelyconstrained, while German-language productions partially filled the resultingvacuum on Ljubljana’s (Laibach’s) stages. Such policies were hardly conducive to


warm relations between the city’s German and Slovene communities, nor didthey give Slovenes a sense that they stood to benefit from a Habsburg victory inthe war.39

The repressive measures imposed on the South Slav territories ultimately hada counterproductive impact on popular sentiment from the Habsburg stand-point. By the time censorship and political repression were relaxed underEmperor-King Karl in late 1916/early 1917, the Yugoslav ideal appeared tohave bounced back and gained stronger support than ever among the urbanpopulation of Croatia and Slovenia. Not only did liberal newspapers renew theircall for political and cultural cooperation among the empire’s Serbs, Croats, andSlovenes, but leaders – such as the Slovene Anton Korošec – of conservativeclericalist parties now added their voices to the Yugoslavist clamor, as didSlovene priests in their Sunday sermons. What was particularly noteworthyabout this shift was that whereas, in past years, conservative Croat and Slovenepoliticians had endorsed the idea of Slovene–Croat autonomy, they now joinedliberal Yugoslavists in explicitly including Serbs (despite their Eastern Orthodoxreligion and suspected sympathies for the Serbian kingdom) in the formula. Theinitiative of a younger generation of clericalists – more open to change andmore attuned to the shifting winds of wartime sentiment – played an importantrole in fostering this new attitude.

Over the course of 1917–1918, Croat and Slovene literary works and stageproductions became increasingly daring in their celebration of Yugoslav themes.An opera entitled The Witch’s Veil that premièred in Zagreb in 1917 combinedmodern staging techniques and Wagnerian structure with elements of traditionalSouth Slav melodies in its interpretation of a heroic Serb folk tale. The periodalso witnessed the founding of literary journals specifically devoted to thepromotion of Yugoslav consciousness and cultural synthesis, such as Zagreb’sKnjiževni jug (The Literary South – first published in January 1918), which made apoint of inviting contributions in all three South Slav linguistic media (Cyrillic-and Latin-script versions of Serbo-Croatian, and Slovene). In February 1918, aZagreb-based journal tried to arrange a public celebration of the 100th anniver-sary of the birth of one of the most famous Illyrianist poets, Petar Preradović.When the formal events were banned, the public thumbed its nose at the author-ities through spontaneous displays – closing down stores for the day, displayingthe Serb, Croat, and Slovene colors, and laying wreaths at the poet’s graveside.

Such cheerfully defiant assertions of liberal-nationalist, Yugoslav solidarityfailed to produce strong echoes from the Croatian countryside, where the urbancommercial and professional classes were perceived as scoff-laws and shirkerswho found ways of avoiding conscription and profiting from black-market tradeand inflated prices on commodities, while the peasantry lost manpower toconscription, livestock to military requisitioning, and income to undiminished orincreased rates of rent and taxation. This increasingly ugly mood exploded intoviolent social unrest in the summer and autumn of 1918. Military deserters inthe Croatian countryside, their numbers now swelled by an influx of CroatPOWs freshly released from Russian captivity and unwilling to be recycled into


cannon fodder, joined forces with destitute Croat peasants in a mountingcampaign of social banditry. Known as the Green Cadres, these forcesnumbered in the tens of thousands by the autumn of 1918. They directed theiranger against landowners and representatives of state authority, destroyed docu-mentary records used in rent- and tax-collection, and, during the climax of therevolt in October–November 1918, carried out raids on towns throughoutCroatia–Slavonia.40

This was, first and foremost, class warfare rather than an expression ofnationalist sentiment. But in the context of the military and political events of1918, it could hardly fail to have a serious impact on the development of nation-alist politics in the region. Indeed, ethnicity played a direct role in shaping thepolitical frames of reference of rural unrest: Croat peasants favored the declara-tion of an independent, social-egalitarian Croat republic or even remainingunder Habsburg rule rather than merging with Serbia. By contrast, much ofCroatia’s minority Serb peasantry – which had been subjected to particularlyharsh treatment by the Habsburg military over the preceding four years –eagerly anticipated liberation at the hands of the Serbian forces that were, bySeptember 1918, fighting their way north from the expanding Allied bridgeheadin Salonika.41 Ethnic divisions also played a role in shaping patterns of violence.In many of their raids on towns, the Green Cadres vented their rage against anygendarmes and civil servants they could lay their hands on, and plundered avariety of commercial establishments. However, Jewish-owned shops were muchmore systematically targeted for looting and burning than were non-Jewishstores. In some cases, Serb-owned stores were also singled out for harsh treat-ment (although in many instances Serb and Croat peasants participated to asimilar extent in the general attacks on propertied classes and local bureaucrats).Serb peasants were generally much more enthusiastic about the idea of Yugoslavunion (which they interpreted to mean immediate establishment of the Serbiankingdom’s authority over the region) than were Croats, and this contributed tointer-communal tension and violence. Fighting between Serbs and Muslims inBosnia spilled over into Croatian border regions as well. For their part, amidstthe collapse of the Habsburg state in October–November 1918, frightenedmunicipal authorities in eastern Croatia (Slavonia) turned to released SerbianPOWs (that is, members of Serbia’s armed forces who had fallen into Habsburgcaptivity) for protection against the marauding Croat peasants.42

The activities of the Green Cadres were an important link in the tangledchain of events that led to the precipitous unification of Croatia and Sloveniawith the kingdom of Serbia in the immediate aftermath of the war. As Habsburgmilitary and political authority melted away in October 1918, enthusiasm for theYugoslav idea reached a crescendo in the region’s urban centers. On 6 October,the major Croat, Serb, and Slovene political parties formed a Zagreb-basedrepresentative body called the National Council of the Slovenes, Croats, andSerbs. On 29 October, the Croatian Sabor (parliament) declared Croatia’s(including Dalmatia) independence and simultaneously declared its merger intoa state of the Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs of the (former) Habsburg lands, under the


authority of the National Council. Such was the enthusiasm over Yugoslav unityat this juncture that the anti-Serb Frankist party declared its own dissolution. (Itwas soon to reappear.)

While all this was going on, the exiled Yugoslav activists (organized into theYugoslav National Committee) were trying to negotiate with the Serbian govern-ment over the terms for a union of Serbia and the Habsburg South Slav lands –terms that would provide for powersharing and confederal arrangements amongthe three major nationalities (see Chapter 5).

A variety of factors, among them the need to act swiftly in the face of Italianterritorial claims and military moves in Istria and Dalmatia, conspired to pres-sure the National Council in Zagreb into bypassing the Yugoslav NationalCommittee and accepting an essentially unconditional merger of the HabsburgSouth Slav lands with Serbia on 1 December. But one of the most criticalelements that led to this development was the terror that the Green Cadresinspired in the hearts of the Croat middle class, which feared the spread ofviolence to the region’s towns and cities. With Habsburg forces gone from thescene, and with insufficient ability to maintain order on its own, the Croatianpolitical elite looked to the army of the restored Serbian state as the most ready-to-hand source of salvation from the threat of social revolution and what it sawas peasant Bolshevism. On 5 November, the harried National Council had issuedan appeal for Serbian troops to be sent in to restore order. Serbia complied, andby the middle of November, most regions had been forcefully pacified andSerbian troops were in occupation of much of Croatia (among other formerlyHabsburg territories). In the hasty political negotiations that ensued, the Serbwing of the HSK dominated the deliberations of the National Council, whileCroat leaders felt ill-equipped to resist.43 Hence the ease with which Belgradesecured an agreement providing for the union of the Habsburg South Slavs withSerbia under the Serbian royal house, with only the vaguest lip service beingpaid to the protection of non-Serbs’ collective rights within the new entity. It is abitter historical irony that the terms for the establishment of a united Yugoslavstate were determined more by the Croats’ internal disunity and the Serbianregime’s shortsighted opportunism than by the overarching strength ofSerb–Croat–Slovene solidarity.

Synopsis

Péter Hanák’s study of Habsburg public opinion during the war suggests that theconflict awakened a wide variety of political sentiments among members ofsubject nationalities. The general political apathy and passive sense of sufferingof the first two years of conflict gave way from early 1917 on to more activeanticipation of, and widespread engagement in, radical social-political activism.Dramatic external events served to stimulate new fears and expectations duringthe latter period: key watersheds were marked by the death of Franz Joseph inNovember 1916, the overthrow of the tsar in March 1917, the American decla-ration of war in the following month, the Bolshevik Revolution of November


1917, and the Russo-Central Powers Peace of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918.Perceptions of the opportunities and dangers that such events created variedacross social classes. Middle-class people began to focus on the possibility ofgaining national independence if the Allies – with the Americans now at theirside – won the war; they feared the possibility of social revolution inspired byevents in Russia. For their part, during late 1917 through early 1918, many peas-ants, laborers, working women, and other segments of the underclasses took astrong and positive interest in the possibility of a socialist revolution that wouldbring about an early end to the conflict on all fronts.

Ultimately, actions speak louder than words: lower-class sympathy for revolu-tionary causes did not automatically erase ethnic boundaries. Hence the failureof the Austro-German and Magyar strike movement of January 1918 to winactive support among the majority of the Czech industrial proletariat: publicopinion among members of all Czech classes had to a large extent convergedaround a common sense of being the victims of exploitation by non-Czechs.Social change was still hoped for by the working class, but it could only come,most of them believed, within the framework of national self-determination.The failure of the strike movement, in turn, convinced many lower-classmembers of ethnic minorities across the length and breadth of the Habsburgmonarchy that social revolution had poor prospects, leaving national indepen-dence as the likeliest scenario for bringing about some sort of change for thebetter.44

While ethnic boundaries stood in the way of socialist internationalism, theydid not necessarily foster unity within individual nationalities. The degree ofsocial consensus prevalent within any ethnic group was dependent on a varietyof factors; the contrast between the Czech and Croat cases is quite striking inthis respect. The longstanding political conflict, cultural clash, and economicrivalry with the ethnic Germans of Bohemia provided a common foe for Czechworkers, bourgeoisie, and peasantry alike. Wartime trends in both the foreignpolicy and domestic politics of Austria created the impression among Czechs ofall classes that the Habsburg state was itself becoming nothing more than thetool of German interests, that the system therefore could not be reformed, and,hence, that national independence might be the only means of safeguardingCzech interests. Moreover, Czech national solidarity extended beyond the urbanframework into the countryside – a function of the relatively high degree of inte-gration between urban and rural economies and societies in Bohemia. (Thispattern was less strongly developed in Moravia.) Finally, the prospect of apossible merger with Slovakia (see Chapter 5) was not a major source of divisionamong Czechs; there was relatively little demographic overlap – and hencelimited pre-existing tension – between the two groups, and Slovaks had no estab-lished polity of their own that might threaten to dominate a future union.

Among the Croats, the war seemed only to aggravate pre-existing uncertain-ties about the nature of national identity and to heighten tensions along multipleethno-social axes. Should Croats look to Vienna to protect them from Budapest,or to the Hungarian authorities to shield them from the arbitrary wartime power


of the Habsburg military? Were the Serbs natural, cultural, and political part-ners for Croats, or were they enemies of Catholicism who would ride roughshodover Croat rights and sensibilities in the event of Croatia’s merger with theSerbian kingdom? Sentiments on such issues swayed back and forth over timeand divided Croats along ideological, class, and regional lines. In August 1914,Croatia’s cities were the scenes of anti-Serb riots. Over the course of the waryears, popular opinion in Croatia’s urban centers did converge around a reinvig-orated, if vaguely defined, Yugoslav ideal. But the Croat peasantry had littleacquaintance with, or sympathy for, this notion. By the final months of the war,hard-pressed Croat peasants were venting their rage against Serb shopkeepersand Croat propertied classes alike. For Croatia’s frightened urban elites, a hastyand poorly negotiated merger with Serbia represented not so much the fulfill-ment of a broadly shared national ideal as a quick escape route from their ownhostile, rural underclass.

Ethnic identity, then, played a powerful role in shaping mass behaviorthroughout the Austro-Hungarian empire during the final stages of the war, andthe war in turn contributed to a politicization of ethnicity. But fixing the culturaland territorial boundaries between nationalities, and determining the relation-ship between ethnicity and nationhood, were contentious issues that underminedthe very unity that nationalism was supposed to foster. Similar paradoxes mani-fested themselves in the other two multinational empires during this period.

The Ethnic Dimension of War and Revolution inRussia

The overthrow of the tsarist regime in March 191745 took place against a back-drop of grotesque mismanagement of the war effort by a government neitherpsychologically nor organizationally capable of effectively mobilizing thecountry’s human and natural resources. The initially successful Brusilov offensiveof 1916 had disintegrated into a chaotic retreat as German forces pressed hardagainst a Russian army whose logistical infrastructure and morale were breakingdown completely. The Provisional Government that replaced the tsar remaineddoggedly committed to the Allied cause, but its attempt to revive the Russian wareffort only guaranteed its own undoing at the hands of the Bolsheviks, whoseized power in a coup d’état in November 1917.

Wartime propaganda efforts in tsarist Russia had failed to create a sustainableframework of patriotic solidarity uniting society and state. The initial wave ofoptimistic faith in tsar, people, and motherland that spread swiftly through theurban and educated sectors of Russian society in August 1914 soon fragmentedinto a myriad of broken ripples and dangerous undertows. Dynastic imageryrapidly lost its popular appeal as a patriotic reference point, practically vanishingwithin months from media of high and popular culture alike and persisting onlyin the stodgy publications of officially endorsed propaganda organs. By the timeit collapsed, the regime had succeeded in completely alienating all classes ofsociety; even the most educated members of the liberal intelligentsia shared in


the widespread but unfounded suspicion that the tsar or those close to him wereactively colluding with the enemy. But if most Russians came to agree that theancien régime did not embody the nation’s identity, there was no consensus aboutwhat did.46

While the war aggravated the Russians’ identity crisis, it accelerated the crys-tallization of national identities – or at least reinforced a collective sense ofalienation from things Russian – among a number of the empire’s minorities.Those most affected were groups stigmatized by the Russian military and admin-istrative authorities as having dual loyalties. Ethnic Germans were an obvioustarget of such accusations. Ukrainians adhering to the Uniate Church weresuspected of maintaining questionable ties with their brethren in Austrian-ruledGalicia, where, in turn, the brief Russian occupation of 1914–1915 was associ-ated with the suppression of Ukrainian-language publications and harassment ofUniate clergy, further antagonizing both the local Ukrainian population andethnic Ukrainian troops among the Russian occupation forces.47 The Turkicpeoples of Central Asia were assumed to sympathize with the Ottoman cause.The Jews were the objects of wild accusations of treachery and collusion withthe enemy; the military authorities targeted them for wholesale deportation fromwestern border regions, while the government effectively banned the publicationof material in Hebrew characters.48 Such reductionist images of peoples –disseminated through both official and unofficial propaganda, and acted uponthrough repressive or discriminatory policies – had a self-fulfilling quality. Forcedinto confining ethnic pigeonholes and labeled as threats to the welfare of Russia,people naturally became eager for “liberation” at the hands of the enemy andmore inclined to think of themselves in unidimensionally ethnic terms.49

Ethnicity played an important role in determining the nature of non-Russians’ participation in the war effort and in shaping their behavior as soldiers.Many of the nationalities of Siberia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, as well asthe Finns, were exempt from conscription.50 As we shall see below, the govern-ment’s violation of the conscription exemption in Central Asia provoked civilunrest in the region. In Finland, the exemption from conscription was honoredby the Russian government, but the wartime influx of soldiers and sailors fromthe Russian army and of laborers from all over the empire assigned to build upFinland’s coastal fortifications provoked xenophobic and racist sentiments amongthe Finnish population and intensified resentment of Russian rule, as did theeconomic hardships associated with the war.51

Among conscripts from those non-Russian nationalities that were subject tomilitary service, desertion from the army’s ranks was in most cases even morecommon than it was among the disaffected Russian peasant troops. Conversely,in cases where the prospect of foreign conquest had particularly ominous impli-cations for a specific ethnic group, its soldiers’ commitment to the war effort wasunusually high. This was the case with Armenian volunteer units deployed in theCaucasus, whose familiarity with the Ottoman army’s habit of slaughteringArmenian communities induced them to maintain a determined military resis-tance long after the front as a whole had collapsed. Likewise, Latvians formed a


special volunteer rifleman force to help defend their territory against theGermans, because a German victory would presumably enable the BalticGermans to indulge in an even more exploitative local hegemony than theyalready enjoyed.52

The common theme among these otherwise disparate attitudes and experi-ences is that they all demonstrate how the war reinforced the role of nationalityin determining loyalties, defining identities, and creating frameworks for collec-tive action. (Such frameworks could quickly change into arenas for civil strife –but they were no less significant for that.) These patterns became all the morepronounced when the all-encompassing, Russian-imperial frame of reference fellto pieces in 1917.

Nationalism and Separatism under the ProvisionalGovernment

The Russian Revolution of March 1917 opened the floodgates to a ragingtorrent of conflicting social and political demands and agendas that ripped thestate from its already fragile moorings and was ultimately to sweep it into thewhirlpool of civil war. As the Russian military machine collapsed over the courseof 1917, the distinction between army life and civilian sector, military affairs anddomestic politics, became ever more blurred. Soldiers in the field formed sovietsthat pressed for egalitarian reforms within the army while cultivating close ties toleft-wing parties active in the workers’ soviets of Petrograd53 and Moscow.Lenin’s slogan of “land and peace” struck a particularly resonant chord amongthe peasant soldiers who made up the overwhelming majority of armyconscripts, and the Bolshevized elements in the military played an important rolein challenging the authority of the officer corps and the Provisional Governmentalike.54 Tens of thousands of soldiers “voted with their feet” (as Lenin put it) bydeserting their units and making their way back to their homes, where theyadded an additional element of violent discontent to the seething cauldron ofsocio-political conflict. Many of the non-Russian soldiers who deserted the ranksof the military (and they did so in even higher proportions than Russian soldiers)became actively involved in the ethnic conflicts and national-liberation strugglesthat engulfed the former empire’s borderlands, as war against the Germans gaveway to civil war.55

The formation of the Provisional Government had raised expectations forsocial and political reform at every level of society and in every region of thecountry. Resolutions, proclamations, and manifestos issued forth from everycorner, and the redress of age-old grievances of every description was impa-tiently awaited. The various cabinets of March–November 1917 weredominated by coalitions led by either the liberal-democratic ConstitutionalDemocrats (Kadets), the moderate socialist Right Socialist Revolutionaries(Right SRs), or both. The great workers’ soviets of Petrograd and Moscow,dominated by a variety of socialist parties including both Right and Left SRs,Mensheviks, and Bolsheviks, were initially cooperative with the Provisional


Government, but soon drifted toward confrontation with it as its insistence onkeeping Russia in the war alienated the lower classes and strengthened the handof the Bolsheviks.

Most parties and movements spoke a common revolutionary idiom of demo-cratic rights and political freedom. But similar words and slogans could take onvery different meanings depending on who uttered them and in what context.For radical socialists, the achievement of political democracy was conditioned onthe liberation of workers and peasants from economic exploitation; the sovietscame to be seen by many as more legitimate repositories of the people’s will thanthe Provisional Government.

The meaning of the popular phrase “national self-determination” was alsohotly contested. Democratization and the recognition of popular sovereigntywere widely seen as going hand-in-hand with some form of self-rule for indi-vidual peoples. Under pressure from the Petrograd Soviet, the ProvisionalGovernment justified its continued commitment to the war effort on the groundsthat Russia was fighting for a new European order based on the democratic prin-ciple of national self-determination.56 The same concept was frequentlymentioned as a guiding principle in the prospective restructuring of the Russianstate itself. But did the phrase mean local autonomy for all ethnic groups, or onlyfor those groups that could point to some historical precedent for such a privi-lege? Did it imply the right to secede altogether from the Russian state?

The Provisional Government was eager to gain widespread legitimacy amongthe peoples of the empire, yet by the same token, it was afraid of seeing the prin-ciple of national self-determination taken to its logical conclusion, which wouldmean the fragmentation of the entire state. This sort of ambivalence had typi-fied the pre-war attitudes of the two parties that dominated the ProvisionalGovernment. The Kadets were on record as favoring cultural autonomy for allnationalities and the restoration of administrative/political autonomy to Finlandand Poland; they were opposed to the federalization of the Russian state as awhole on the ground that this would exacerbate ethnic tensions rather thanresolve them. The Socialist Revolutionaries’ official platform did endorse “thewidest possible application of the federal principle to the relations among theindividual nationalities,” but the party was riven by internal differences over howfar the implementation of such a policy could go without causing economic frag-mentation and undermining class consciousness.57

Upon coming to power, the Provisional Government did away with all legisla-tion discriminating against ethnic and religious minorities and established fullcivic equality as the basis of the legal system. It also declared its recognition ofthe Finnish people’s right to “internal independence” and issued a proclamationrecognizing the right of Poland to self-government.58 Petrograd’s official stancetoward other autonomy movements was that the idea of reorganizing Russia as ademocratic federation of nationalities – as advocated by a congress of the non-Russian peoples of the Russian empire that met in Kiev in September – was finein principle, but that the Provisional Government lacked the authority to imple-ment such a policy. Any serious initiative would have to await the election of a


Constituent Assembly. This stance was regarded by nationalist leaders as somuch legalistic quibbling that ill-concealed the persistence of Great Russianchauvinism among the country’s new leadership. As if to confirm the perceptionthat it could not break with the past, Petrograd proved unwilling or unable tonegotiate a compromise even with the leaders of the newly reinstated Finnishparliament (sejm), dissolving the assembly instead.

As in its relationship with the soviets and as in its commitment to the wareffort, so too in its nationalities policy, the Provisional Government was unable tokeep pace with a rising tide of emancipatory expectations. The more it resisteddemands for the immediate decentralization and federalization of government,the more it alienated its erstwhile supporters among the intelligentsia and nation-alist leaderships of the non-Russian peoples. The lower classes of every ethnicgroup were embittered by the government’s insistence on continuing a drainingwar effort that seemed ever more futile and purposeless. By November, when theBolsheviks seized power in a carefully orchestrated coup, the ProvisionalGovernment no longer enjoyed mass support in the Russian urban centers, thecountryside, or the non-Russian periphery. Moreover, their disappointing rela-tionship with the Petrograd authorities led some nationalists to question whetherliberal-democratic, parliamentary values and institutions were really as compat-ible with nationalist agendas as they had thought (see Chapter 6).

The Socio-Cultural Bases of Ethnic Unrest

The official records of nationalist assemblies and councils that passed resolutionsand issued proclamations during 1917 would seem to suggest that every ethnicminority in the country was united in its single-minded determination to achieveself-rule either within a federated union or through outright secession. The truthis that some of these documents were produced by deliberative assemblies thatwere representative of little more than themselves. Most notably, in the case ofBelorussia, where the nationalist Hromada Party organized a National Congressthat attempted to establish an independent republic in December 1917, no echoof support for its stance could be discerned among the peasantry that made upthe overwhelming majority of the Belorussian population. The group ofdisgruntled intellectuals who took this dramatic plunge into the nation-buildingenterprise were members of a tiny Belorussian urban population that was over-whelmingly outnumbered by Poles and Jews even in Minsk, the capital of thenew republic. Indeed, in the elections to the Constituent Assembly (conductedover the course of two weeks in November–December 1917), the Bolsheviks hadwon over 60 per cent of the vote in Belorussia, suggesting that Lenin’s slogan of“land and peace” was more appealing to the typical Belorussian peasant than“national self-determination.”59 The only reason the Hromada’s proclamation ofan independent state had any practical significance at all was that it was followedin February 1918 by a German military advance into Belorussia, whereupon theGerman high command embraced the idea of a nominally independent state as


a convenient fig leaf for the imposition of German rule.60 German conquest alsoprovided the backdrop for the Latvian declaration of independence.

Yet many of the nationalist movements that were active during this periodclearly were able to evoke a positive response among the masses on whose behalfthey claimed to speak. Across the length and breadth of the country, economicdevastation and the fragmentation of the country’s political institutions had castmany communities adrift, forced to fend for themselves in the midst of aHobbesian nightmare. As any semblance of rule of law vanished into thin air,people turned for help to social networks based on shared cultural identities andcommon material interests. The attraction of utopian political fantasies based onethnic separatism and/or social revolution increased correspondingly. Indeed,Ronald Suny has argued that it was in those cases where nationalist agendascould be coupled with socio-economic grievances that political movements weremost successful at generating significant support among the masses.61

By looking at a few cases out of the hundreds of ethnic groups in the Russianempire, we can gain a sense both of the powerful impetus that the events of thisperiod gave to the spread of nationalist ideas among the popular classes of manynationalities, and of the uncertainties and conflicts that arose as people fromdifferent social strata and regions strove to define what, if anything, they had incommon as a nation. The Ukrainian example highlights the ambiguity andvolatility of the relationship between rapidly evolving class and national identi-ties. An overview of political activism among Russia’s Muslims underlines thedilemmas and contradictions involved in defining the geographical boundaries ofnationhood.

In the Ukraine,62 following the tsar’s fall, the major nationalist parties conveneda national council (Rada) in Kiev. Unanimously electing Mykhailo Hrushevskyas its President, the Rada declared its support for the Provisional Governmentand put forth demands for Ukrainian self-rule. Petrograd responded ambiva-lently. It expressed respect for the democratic rights of the Ukrainian people,while insisting on its right to appoint administrators and officials in Ukrainianprovinces, rather than ceding that power to the Rada. In June–July, Petrogradbeat a tactical retreat, recognizing the Rada as a channel for the transmission ofthe central government’s authority. After a period during which the Radaattempted to cooperate with the Provisional Government on the basis of thisambiguous understanding, it became clear that Petrograd’s and Kiev’s respectiveinterpretations of the agreement were mutually incompatible. Mounting tensionsculminated in November 1917 in the Rada’s extension of support to theBolsheviks in expelling military units loyal to the Provisional Government fromsome of the Ukraine’s major cities. This was immediately followed by the procla-mation of a Ukrainian People’s Republic.63

The evolution of the Petrograd–Kiev relationship was strongly influenced bythe pressures of Ukrainian mass politics during this period. The moderate toneof the Rada’s initial demands ran against the currents of social and politicalradicalism that were sweeping across the Ukrainian peasantry in 1917. Popular


demands for economic change became closely linked to calls for a tougher stanceon the issue of national self-determination. This grassroots movementcontributed to a hardening of the Rada’s position, as did the increasingly trans-parent avoidance tactics of the Russian Provisional Government.

The two main catalysts of nationalist radicalization among the Ukrainianpeasantry were conscripts’ experience of the war and the almost universalresentment of prevalent land-ownership patterns. Compulsory service in themilitary removed peasants from the narrow radius of their rural existence andbrought them into closer-than-comfortable contact with members of unfamiliarethnic groups as well as with co-ethnics from all over the Ukraine. This musthave heightened their awareness of how much more they had in common withfellow conscripts who spoke the same language than they did with those whosecustoms and tongues were alien and unfamiliar to them. The brutality of thewar reinforced the crystallization of ethnic affinities. Hostility came to focus notso much on the officially designated German or Austro-Hungarian enemy as onthe Russian-dominated officer corps that was sending conscripts to their deaths.Soon after word of the March Revolution reached the front, Ukrainian soldiers –modeling themselves on the Polish military formations that were taking shapewith Petrograd’s blessing at this time – began forming organizations that lookedto the Rada for leadership and that called for the creation of separate Ukrainianmilitary units. (A parallel process took place among soldiers of many other non-Russian nationalities.) Soldiers based in Kiev organized Ukrainian MilitaryCongresses that convened in May and then again – in defiance of Petrograd’sorders to the contrary – in June and October. These volatile assemblies were forafor the articulation of radical demands for full political autonomy regardless ofthe Provisional Government’s legalistic hesitations.

Among the Ukrainian peasantry, the political upheavals of 1917 gave rise toan intense expectation of salvation from economic exploitation and deprivation.This took concrete form in the demand for an immediate redistribution of land,away from the mostly Polish and Russian gentry and to the Ukrainianpeasantry.64 The Rada’s attempts to negotiate a political compromise withPetrograd during the summer of 1917 held little interest for villagers who wereeager to attain their vision of social justice in the agrarian sphere – a vision thatwas linked to demands for self-rule. It was widely recognized that a land-reformprogram implemented on a Russia-wide basis might entail the distribution ofsome of the Ukraine’s productive land to “immigrants” from other parts of thecountry. Moreover, the communal land-tenure system common among Russianpeasants was alien to many Ukrainian villagers, who were more accustomed toprivate ownership. For Ukrainian peasant organizations, therefore, the attain-ment of political autonomy seemed like an essential precondition forimplementing a successful land-reform program on their own terms. As themonths slipped by with no apparent move either toward the redistribution ofland or toward the clear-cut attainment of Ukrainian autonomy, peasant supportfor the Rada declined precipitously. At the All-Ukrainian Peasant Congresses of1917, this sense of frustration expressed itself in increasingly strident demands


for Ukrainian self-rule and for a complete break, if necessary, with theProvisional Government.

It was those Ukrainian parties that were able to link the nationalist agenda tothe socio-economic grievances of the rural population that gained the broadestsupport among the masses. The Rada was originally dominated by a coalition ofliberal-democratic intellectuals calling themselves the Society of UkrainianProgressives (TUP was their Ukrainian acronym), a group that Hrushevsky wasclosely associated with. Although they advocated Ukrainian autonomy, theTUP’s leaders were also committed to working in cooperation with liberal-demo-cratic forces in Russia. As the months went by, the TUP found itself isolated in aRada whose political complexion was steadily becoming more radical undermounting pressure from peasants and soldiers. The TUP soon gave way to acoalition dominated by Ukrainian Social Democrats (USDs), who formed thedominant element during the period of negotiations with Petrograd. The USDshad once been opposed to Ukrainian nationalism on Marxist doctrinal grounds,and were now trying to soften their position in light of popular enthusiasm forthe idea of self-rule. However, their failure to achieve a clear-cut agreement withthe Petrograd authorities on Ukrainian autonomy, combined with their reluc-tance to take unilateral action outside a negotiated framework, strengthened thehand of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries (USRs). The USRs attacked theUSDs for their legalistic preoccupations, insisting that the nationalization andredistribution of land within the context of a fully autonomous Ukraine mustcommence immediately, regardless of whether or not prior agreement had beenreached with the Provisional Government. This platform earned the USRswidespread support in local elections, and the surge of popular enthusiasm forthe USRs convinced Hrushevsky to join them as their leader. To his shockedformer allies in the TUP, Hrushevsky explained that the USRs’ radical stancereflected the will of the people; to ignore it or resist it was to swim against thecurrent of history and to violate the populist principles on which his idea of theUkrainian national movement had always been based.

In practice, the Rada could not enforce its authority in much of the country-side, where, in the context of a growing power vacuum, rogue Cossack units andlocal peasant militias ran amok, attacking the gentry and seizing lands. The lesscontrol it exercised, the more eager the Rada’s leadership became to adoptextreme measures that might gain it a loyal following among the masses. Thegrowing pressure from the peasants’ and soldiers’ congresses and the initiatives ofthe Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries pushed the Rada toward open confronta-tion with the Provisional Government. The Rada’s support for the Bolshevikforces in Kiev in November was the product of a strictly tactical alliance,designed to end Petrograd’s authority in the region once and for all and to facili-tate the establishment of Ukrainian political independence. Pro-independencesentiment among the peasantry may have had more to do with its eagerness for aland-reform program whose benefits would not be shared with outsiders thanwith the nationalist ideology of the intelligentsia; nonetheless, mass support for


political separation had played a critical role in the developments leading up tothe Rada’s proclamation of the Ukrainian People’s Republic.65

Representatives of Russia’s Islamic peoples responded to the March Revolutionby organizing All-Russian Muslim Congresses that met in Moscow and Kazanduring the summer of 1917, and by forming a twenty-five-member, Moscow-based, Muslim National Council (milli shura, commonly referred to simply as theShura) designed to promote Muslim interests throughout Russia. Unfortunately,it proved very difficult to reach a consensus on what the nature of those interestswere. Not only were there tensions between conservative clerics and Jadids, butthe sudden opportunity of taking political action revealed deep divisions amongthe reformist elements themselves. The Volga Tatars who dominated theCongresses represented a population that had lived cheek-by-jowl with Russiansfor centuries and that had successfully carved out a socio-economic niche foritself in the Russian empire by developing a large and enterprising commercialmiddle class. Their reformers were the most secular in orientation and most fullyversed in parliamentary politics and modern administrative techniques. Many ofthem embraced Socialist Revolutionary or Menshevik political programs, whilemost other progressive Muslim elites were affiliated with the Kadets. Given thatthe Volga Tatars lived in the midst of ethnic Russians, and that their commercialinterests extended throughout the empire, their leaders advocated support for theprinciple of extraterritorial cultural autonomy. The Central Asian and Caucasusrepresentatives hailed from economically underdeveloped provinces where therapid influx of Russian colonists presented an immediate threat to the livelihoodsand lifestyles of the indigenous populations; territorial autonomy seemed muchmore relevant to their needs. Moreover, the idea of extraterritorial autonomyraised the prospect of a central administrative body in charge of Muslim affairsthroughout Russia – just the sort of institution that the Volga Tatars would bewell positioned to dominate.

The Muslim Congresses sought to paper over such conflicts by passing resolu-tions in favor of extraterritorial cultural autonomy for all Muslims in the countryas well as territorial autonomy for individual Muslim peoples, but this compro-mise did little to foster substantive cooperation. Their superior organizationaland rhetorical talents allowed the Tatars to dominate the Shura, where theycontinued to promote their idea of extraterritorial autonomy, while manynationalists in Central Asia and Azerbaijan rejected the Shura’s authority andformed their own councils in their home regions. Meanwhile, the ProvisionalGovernment’s reluctance to commit itself to any form of autonomy disillusionedall the Muslim groups and further undermined the Muslim National Council’sauthority. The Muslim National Assembly (majlis) that was convened in Ufa inNovember 1917 did not last more than two months. As the Russian state itselffell to pieces, the geographic diffuseness of its Muslim populations put an end toany pretense of concerted action among them.66

These circumstances tended to bring regional and ethnic identities to thepolitical foreground in many of Russia’s Muslim lands. Although pan-Islamic


and pan-Turkist themes continued to play an important role, mass support wasmost readily mobilized around immediate economic issues that were linked tolocal ethnic conflicts. A notable example is that of the Kazakhs, who had playeda central role in the first major wartime revolt in Russia in 1916. The traditionalexemption from conscription enjoyed by Central Asian Muslims was abolished in1916, when the tsarist regime – hard pressed for manpower resources –announced that able-bodied men were to form labor brigades that would servebehind the front lines. This provoked rebellions in the cities and agriculturalregions of Turkestan, but it was the Kazakh pastoralists of the steppe whooffered the most stubborn resistance. For decades, the tsarist state had beenturning over Kazakh lands to Russian agricultural colonists, limiting the pastureavailable for Kazakh livestock, and circumscribing the nomads’ freedom ofmovement. The conscription order was seen as the latest in a series of attacks onthe Kazakh way of life; only the most ruthless severity enabled the Russian armyto suppress the ensuing uprising. In its wake, an even more aggressive encroach-ment on Kazakh grazing rights was initiated by Russian settlers who now feltfree to slaughter those who stood in their way with complete impunity.67

Traditional tribal leaders and Muslim clerics played key roles in leading andencouraging the rebels, while the handful of secular (Kadet-affiliated) Kazakhnationalists who ran the newspaper Qazaq initially advocated compliance withthe conscription order as a means of winning concessions from the Russiangovernment. Their alienation from popular sentiment was short lived, though,for the failure of the rebellion discredited the traditional Kazakh leadership andthe subsequent fall of the tsarist government created a new political environmentthat favored the secular intellectuals who were capable of engaging in the revolu-tionary discourse of 1917. The group, organized around the editorial board ofQazaq, took the lead in articulating disappointment with the All-MuslimCongresses and frustration with the Provisional Government’s reticence on thenationalities issue. A series of Kazakh political congresses organized by theQazaq group culminated in November 1917 (just after the fall of the ProvisionalGovernment) in the proclamation of an autonomous Kazakh governing councilcalled the Alash Orda.68

In the eyes of the Kazakh nationalists, economic interests and ethnic identitywere inextricably intertwined, for the pastoral existence that constituted the basisof the Kazakh masses’ economic livelihood was also a defining element of theirethno-cultural identity. The spread of Russian colonists and the impositions ofthe Russian state threatened to destroy this people’s entire way of life; the culti-vation of the Kazakh language and culture was a vital element in building upthe population’s will to resist. The contributors to Qazaq made a point of usingthe Kazakh language rather than Tatar as their medium of communication.They also sought to link their secularism to a specifically Kazakh ethnic identityby playing up the fact that conversion to Islam had come late for most Kazakhs.Indeed, Islamization of the Kazakhs had been initiated in the eighteenth centuryby Volga Tatar missionaries with the encouragement of Catherine the Great,who hoped that conversion would lead the unruly steppe nomads to emulate


their pacific and civilized Tatar brethren. In a sense, then, Islam could beportrayed as a legacy of Russian cultural imperialism!69

For the leaders of the Alash Orda, then, secularization and modernizationcould in fact reinvigorate the national culture: a progressive educational systemcould be used to teach Kazakhs how to read and write their own language aswell as how to employ more efficient livestock-raising techniques. This wouldfacilitate an adaptation to modern economic conditions within a framework thatdrew on elements from the Kazakhs’ traditional nomadic lifestyle. The reac-tionary influence of Islamic law (shariat) would give way to a progressive legalsystem that would draw its legitimacy from tribal custom (adat). The emancipa-tion of women from the restrictive practices of Islam would allow them tocontribute their full energies to the building of the nation.

In Azerbaijan, the Musavat Party commanded overwhelming support amonglocal Muslims during 1917–1920 by promoting a vague but appealing platformthat mixed Marxist social reformism with an ill-defined nationalism directedagainst Russian imperial domination, but more specifically against the domina-tion of regional economic and political life by the Armenian and Russiancommercial and working classes of the oil city of Baku. The leader of theMusavat had been in the forefront of opposition to the Tatar program ofextraterritorial autonomy for Russia’s Muslims and in favor of outright feder-alism at the Muslim Congress of May 1917. What actually constituted theframework for the national identity of Azerbaijani Muslims was left unclear.There had for many decades been a debate between advocates of a literarylanguage based on local dialects and supporters of Gasprinsky’s pan-Turkiclingua franca (see Chapter 3). Some Musavat leaders had a history of active pan-Turkism with an orientation toward Istanbul, and the party essentially welcomedthe advance of Ottoman troops into the region with open arms in 1918. It wasthe actual experience of occupation by the Ottoman military, which violated itsprofessions of fraternal amity by pursuing politically repressive policies, that ledto the definitive alienation of the Musavat from pan-Turkism and its unam-biguous turn toward an avowedly Azerbaijani nationalism.70

Thus, the impact of the war and the chaos of the revolution had damagedthe credibility of traditional leaders and undermined the geopolitical frames ofreference of the pan-Turkist and pan-Islamic Jadids. In the case of the Kazakhs,the resultant political void was filled by a tiny group of intellectuals associatedwith a specifically Kazakh ethnonationalism, while the Musavat turned in asimilar direction in Azerbaijan. Ethnic and/or regional loyalties prevailed overbroader constructions of national identity elsewhere as well. The Jadids ofTurkestan gathered in Kokand to proclaim the formation of a TurkestanAutonomous Government in November–December 1917, but Khiva andBukhara – the cultural capital of Turkestan – remained under the control oftheir emirs. Although he was willing to form a tactical alliance against theBolsheviks with the Kokand government, the Emir of Bukhara resisted theBukharan Jadids’ attempts to gain power in his own realm and found it easy to


convince the urban mob that these secular intellectuals were apostates who hadmore in common with the hated Russians than with their own people.71

In general, then, Islamic identity played a central role in setting Turkic andother Muslim peoples apart from Russian administrators and settlers; yet it wasnot a sufficient basis for concerted action on a Russia-wide scale given theabsence of a cohesive organizational infrastructure and the collapse of theRussian state itself as a unified forum of activity. Local issues – and hencenarrowly defined ethno-cultural and/or regional identities – formed the mostmeaningful context for political action in the Muslim areas of the empire as theydid in many of the non-Muslim regions.

What general conclusions can one draw from the wide spectrum of responsesthat the events of 1917 elicited from Russia’s nationalities? Ronald Grigor Sunyhas argued that class and ethnic identities cannot be understood in isolation fromone another in the context of the Russian Revolution.72 Both were fluid andconditional forms of self-definition that were constantly being reshaped byongoing socio-cultural developments and that had a decisive influence on eachother’s development. In the case of the Armenians, who faced an imminentprospect of physical annihilation at the hands of the advancing Ottoman armyin 1918, all social strata united under the banner of the Dashnaktsutiun – anostensibly socialist-revolutionary organization that functioned in practice as anational-liberation movement for Armenians of all classes. In the case of theLatvians and Belorussians, groups that were composed overwhelmingly ofimpoverished peasants, an end to the war and a redistribution of land were over-riding priorities that overshadowed any faint glimmerings of nationalconsciousness. This was reflected in their overwhelming support for theBolsheviks, rather than for their “own” nationalist parties, in the elections for theConstituent Assembly in November 1917. The formation of an independentLatvian state was a byproduct of the German army’s conquest of the region in1918, rather than of an upsurge of popular enthusiasm for national liberation.

It is between the two ends of the nation–class spectrum, Suny contends, thatmost forms of group identity lay. Thus, the Ukrainian peasant masses wereattracted to the nationalist rhetoric and imagery of the Ukrainian SocialistRevolutionaries because the latter linked material grievances to ethnic identity ina manner that resonated among the populace. The slogan of returningUkrainian land to the Ukrainian people took on a powerful double-meaning,evoking both the issue of the peasantry’s relationship to farmland and thenation’s relationship to the national territory. When the advancing Germanarmy set up a socially reactionary Ukrainian puppet state in 1918, mass supportfor the nationalist idea dissipated, and the Bolsheviks were subsequently able togain a broad popular following in the Ukraine as they in turn held forth theprospect of land redistribution. Nationalism in and of itself had no meaning forthe masses; only as a medium for the expression of the Ukrainian peasantry’sidentity and interests as peasants did it enjoy mass appeal.

Suny points to Georgia as a case where common ethnic identity provided a


framework for the development of a broad-based socialist consciousness.Georgian peasants and gentry alike resented the influence wielded over the ruraleconomy by the largely Armenian commercial and manufacturing classes of thecities. The Georgian intelligentsia (many of whom had roots in the gentry) weredrawn to the Marxist discourse that attacked the role of the bourgeoisie, andhence created a coherent ideological framework for opposition to the ethnicallyalien urban elites. The result was an unusual fusing of socialist internationalismwith national identity under the rubric of the Georgian branch of theMenshevik Party. The Georgian Mensheviks, who retained a virtual monopoly ofmass support during the period of the Russian Revolution and Civil War,remained committed throughout 1917 to working for social and political changewithin the overall framework of a reformed Russian state. It was only with thecollapse of the Russian state amidst the ongoing advance of Turkish forces thatthey were left with no option but to go it alone at the head of an independentnation-state.

Suny’s approach emphasizes the subjective, cultural basis of collectiveconsciousness. He rejects static and objective definitions of group identity,arguing that class and nation are mutable frameworks of self-understandingrather than fixed compartments of scientific classification. As such, there needbe no conflict between them – class consciousness and ethnic identity oftenevolved into two parts of a seamless whole under the pressures of war and revo-lution. By the same token, changing conditions (such as the creation ofreactionary puppet states by the German occupation forces) could tear apartsuch syntheses even more quickly than they had been formed, alienating thelowest strata of society from the nationalist paradigm and sending them into thearms of the Bolsheviks.

While, in general, Suny’s paradigm constitutes an excellent tool for the anal-ysis of mass politics during the war, it does contain an inherent contradiction. Inhis theoretical formulation, which draws on the methodology and vocabulary ofpost-modernism, he emphasizes the centrality of collective discourse in theconstitution of popular identities, yet goes on to contend that the process doesnot inherently favor either class or nation as the framework for the definition ofcollective consciousness. Surely, though, his own work strongly suggests thatsharing a common culture and common language is a fundamental prerequisitefor conducting a meaningful discourse, and therefore an almost indispensableprecondition for the crystallization of political identity. Class identity could easilybecome a dominant reference point within an ethnic group, as among theUkrainian peasantry, and this could then serve to hinder or facilitate the consoli-dation of a national identity, depending on how effectively the nationalistleadership played to its mass audience. But whereas common ethnic identity wasoften successfully used to create bonds among different classes, class identityrarely transcended the ethnic divide. The Belorussian peasants’ electoral supportfor the Bolsheviks should probably not be taken as an indication that they had astrong sense of class solidarity with the workers and peasants of all Russia. Thatwould represent a highly unlikely leap from local bonds of kinship and village


community to sophisticated internationalist consciousness. A more plausibleexplanation would be that among rural ethnic groups that did not yet have astrong sense of distinctive national identity, the Bolsheviks’ rejection of officialstate patriotism and their promises of peace and land spoke directly to theimmediate, local, and personal concerns of illiterate peasants. Where class didserve as the framework for the formation of an imagined community broaderthan that of the immediate village, it usually did so within the bounds of an ethnicgroup rather than across cultural and linguistic frontiers. Ultimately, as Sunyhimself points out, the Belorussians proved to be one of the easiest ethnic groupsfor the Bolshevik state to absorb precisely because their linguistic and culturalcharacteristics (dare one say their objective ethnic characteristics?) were alreadyso similar to those of the Russians.73 Similar factors may have contributed to theinconsistency of Ukrainian peasants’ attachment to separatist nationalism.

The case of the Latvians does stand out as an anomaly, for the LatvianBolsheviks were a highly active and engaged component of Lenin’s movementwho were able to tap into genuinely widespread popular support among theirown ethnic group for their avowedly internationalist position. The Latvianlanguage was very distinctive (it was not even Slavic) and literacy rates amongLatvians were among the highest in the Russian empire, suggesting that evenpoor peasants in this region had broader mental horizons than their Belorussiancounterparts. The Latvian volunteer riflemen who had fought the advancingGerman army during the war did not become a nationalist vanguard, butinstead proved particularly sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, voting for them inoverwhelming numbers in the elections to the Constituent Assembly.74 A regi-ment of Latvian riflemen served as the Bolsheviks’ Praetorian Guard inPetrograd in the wake of the November Revolution.75 Had it not been for theGerman military occupation of Latvia in 1918, it is doubtful whether themiddle-class nationalist parties would have been able to gain power.

Part of the explanation may lie in the fact that Latvia was a region whereindustrialization and commercialization of agriculture had proceeded faster thanin almost any other part of the Russian empire. This had contributed to therapid emergence of new classes with conflicting interests: in the cities, a rela-tively large Latvian working class resented the growing economic dominance ofthe Latvian bourgeoisie, whereas the countryside was divided between largenumbers of landless peasants and a highly visible minority of relatively pros-perous peasant proprietors. All of these groups resented the continued economicand administrative dominance of the Baltic German barons, but they weredeeply divided over who should inherit the instruments of political authorityonce the German elite had been dealt with. Radical Marxism was thus able totap into a broader popular base in Latvia than in any other part of the Russianempire. For their part, the middle-class nationalists’ behavior in 1917 suggestedthat they did not plan on sharing power with the landless peasants or workers ina self-governing Latvia.76

Finally, the very anomalousness of Bolshevism’s success in Latvia lent theLatvian Bolsheviks very high visibility and influence within Lenin’s party. The


support of the Latvian Social Democrats had played a critical role in Lenin’spower struggles with the Mensheviks, and from the summer of 1917 on – at atime when the Russian army was generally disintegrating – the LatvianBolsheviks were able to gain influence and maintain extraordinary discipline andenthusiasm among the riflemen by leading them to think of themselves as thespearhead of the coming socialist revolution.77 For members of a tiny, long-oppressed ethnic group to assume a highly visible and distinguished role in theunfolding of events that would shape Russia and the world must have beenparticularly exhilarating – much more rewarding, in fact, than the prospect ofvying for power with the Latvian bourgeoisie within the confines of a minusculenation-state. The very uniqueness of their stance – and the opportunity itcreated for them to play a disproportionately prominent historico-political role –may have reinforced the commitment of the Latvian Bolsheviks and theirsupporters to the internationalist dream.78 Ethnic identity certainly cannot bedismissed as an important factor contributing to the extraordinary solidarity andhigh motivation of the riflemen; it is just that the role they chose to play as agroup was acted out on the grand stage of Russian revolutionary politics ratherthan in the sideshow of Latvian separatism.

The Provisional Government’s failure to act resolutely on the nationalities issuehad added to its many enemies and hastened its downfall. The Bolshevik regimethat replaced it was to prove far more resolute – but not in the manner thatRussia’s nationalist and separatist movements might have hoped. As we shall seein Chapter 6, ethnic conflict overlapped with class and ideological conflict in theensuing civil war, and led the Bolsheviks to formulate a novel approach to theproblem of national identity in a socialist state.

The Burden of War in the Middle East

In considering the Ottoman empire in the Great War, it is worth bearing in minda couple of broad distinguishing features that set it apart from the Austro-Hungarian and Russian cases. One is that the events of 1914 did not constitutequite as clearcut a watershed for Ottoman history as they did for the other twoempires, given that the Ottomans had just been involved in three wars over thepreceding three years. What with the major territorial losses (in Libya and theBalkans) associated with two of those wars and the ongoing upheaval of theYoung Turk revolution, the Ottoman state was already in the midst of adramatic political and ideological transformation at the time of its entry into theGreat War on the Central Powers’ side in November 1914. 1914 marked thebeginning of a new phase in this transformative process rather than an unher-alded departure from previous experience.

Second, the Young Turks maintained the state’s cohesion to the very end ofthe conflict. Cohesion is a relative term, to be sure; throughout the war, indi-vidual provincial governors exercised considerable autonomy in the pursuit oftheir own political agendas and patronage interests.79 But there was no sudden


collapse of the empire or dramatic breaking away of its provinces (other thanthe Hejaz – which had been only loosely controlled by Istanbul in the first place;see Chapter 5). During the final years of the conflict, the Ottoman army wassteadily beaten back by British forces, but the Ottoman state remained intact tothe end within whatever perimeter its military could hold. This was due in partto the earlier territorial and political transformations referred to above: theOttomans had already lost their most independence-minded provinces in theBalkans in 1912–1913; their remaining territories were overwhelmingly Muslimin population and hence more amenable to continued rule by the Sultan-Caliph(who remained in place as a figurehead throughout the Young Turk period).

By the same token, the war did serve as a powerful catalyst for the intensifica-tion of previous transformative trends and the initiation of new ones. The factthat pan-Islamism might serve as an integrating rather than divisive ideologywithin the post-1913 territories of the empire was not lost upon the Young Turkrulers as they entered the fray in 1914. Yet even as they cynically revived thispre-revolutionary propaganda line, they forged ahead with the cultivation ofTurkish nationalism – a nationalism now shorn of its erstwhile liberal accouter-ments and unabashedly chauvinistic and expansionist in its aims. And among theArab population of the Levant and Mesopotamia, while the majority remainedquiescent, a tiny activist minority was caught up in events that would later formthe basis of a pan-Arab nationalist myth.

The Radicalization of Turkish Nationalism

The 1908 Revolution that brought the Young Turks to power was but the first ina series of dramatic events that were to alter radically the territorial and politicalconfiguration of the empire. From 1908 to 1913, the CUP’s Central Committeeruled indirectly, as a secretive oversight body that dictated policy to the govern-ment without any public accountability. The Young Turks responded tomounting criticism in parliament by arranging for its dissolution in 1912 andusing crude and violent tactics to ensure the election of a more compliantchamber. Leaders of opposition movements were forced underground or intoexile. In 1913, renewed opposition combined with military setbacks and territo-rial losses in the Balkan Wars finally led the CUP to seize direct control of thereins of government, forming a cabinet dominated by Enver Pasha, Talat Pasha,and Jemal Pasha.80 It was this triumvirate that engineered the Ottoman empire’sentry into the First World War on what it gambled would be the winningGerman side, in the hopes of compensating for the recent humiliations by recon-quering Egyptian and Transcaucasian lands lost to the British and Russians inearlier years.

The Young Turks tried to gain popular support for their policies throughmultiple propaganda campaigns designed to appeal to different sectors of thepopulation. These campaigns were not necessarily consistent with one another,and some of them were more directly indicative of the governing elite’s ideolog-ical predilections than were others. Specifically, the Turkish-nationalist elements


of wartime propaganda appear to have reflected the political agenda of keyleaders of the CUP, who saw the war not only as an opportunity to recoup someof the territorial losses of recent years but to fulfill ambitious pan-Turkistdreams.

The Ottomanist idea, to which the CUP had continued to pay lip service longafter abandoning it in practice, was now almost completely discarded: a conceptof interest to a handful of liberal intellectuals, it clearly was incapable ofarousing the sort of mass passions needed to sustain a major military effort. Onthe other hand, pan-Islamism, which had been propagated by SultanAbdülhamit’s ancien régime, was now opportunistically seized upon by the secu-larist Young Turks as a means of generating support for the war among theMuslim masses of all nationalities. On the government’s instructions, the Muslimreligious authorities issued a proclamation, to which the Sultan (in his capacity asCaliph) also affixed his name, that defined Ottoman involvement in the war as ajihad (divinely sanctioned struggle) against the infidels. This was not onlyintended to unite Turks, Kurds, and Arabs in the struggle against the TripleEntente; the document also addressed the Muslim populations of the British,Russian, and French empires, calling upon them to rise up in arms against theiroppressors.81

The separate theme of Turkish and pan-Turkist nationalism that was takenup by wartime propaganda organs in Anatolia was much more directly linked tothe ideological convictions and political-administrative practices of the CUP inpower.82 The war served as both an opportunity and a catalyst for experimenta-tion with extreme forms of ethnic nationalism. The course of Ottoman militarycampaigns over the war years further reinforced the belief that pan-Turkismheld the key to the empire’s future, as Arab lands were steadily lost to the Britishwhile the disintegration of the Russian empire appeared to open up fantasticopportunities for expansion into Turkic lands to the north.

The CUP’s growing interest in Turkish nationalism had been powerfullyspurred by the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913. The joint Serbian, Montenegrin,Greek, and Bulgarian attack on the Ottomans’ remaining Balkan possessionshad come as the Italians were completing their conquest of Tripolitania (Libya),which they had invaded in 1911. Rather than heralding the dawn of a new eraof progress, the Young Turk revolution seemed only to have awakened theappetites of European states eager to take advantage of internal turmoil inIstanbul and reluctant to see the CUP consolidate control over the empire’soutlying provinces. A shift in Balkan alliances enabled the Ottomans to regaincontrol of the province of Adrianople (Edirne) in the Second Balkan War (1913),but Albania, Macedonia, and Thrace had been lost.

The Balkan Wars seemed to provide an object lesson in the power of nation-alism. Most of the regions lost in the conflict were populated by non-Turkswhose own nationalist impulses had clearly undermined the Ottoman grip overthose territories; even the mostly Muslim Albanians had launched a revolt in1910 in the face of the Young Turks’ centralizing policies. On the other hand,some of the most successful actions of the Ottoman army had been conducted


by a tightly knit group of Turkish officers under the leadership of Enver, many ofwhom had earlier volunteered to lead guerrilla operations against the Italians inNorth Africa. The success of these fedaîler’s (volunteers’) operations against theBulgarians had depended on the active support of the local Turkish-speakingpopulation in Edirne and parts of Thrace.83

These experiences reinforced the sense that ethnic identity was a criticalelement in determining mass loyalties and that the future of the Ottomanempire depended largely on the Young Turks’ ability to awaken nationalistpassions among the Turkish populace. The succession of external militarythreats and internal political crises had also magnified the influence and prestigeof the radical, Turkish-nationalist fedaîler, whose growing role as the strong armof the CUP seemed indispensable. It is no coincidence, then, that the period ofthe Balkan Wars marked the beginning of the CUP’s open sponsorship andencouragement of pan-Turkist propaganda. Most notably, it was in 1912–1913that the CUP began to encourage the growth of a recently founded pan-Turkistorganization called Türk Ocaği (Turkish Hearth). Led by prominent pan-Turkistintellectuals like Yusuf Akçura and Ağaoğlu Ahmet, Türk Ocaği establishedbranches in many cities, where it organized cultural activities designed to fosterthe growth of pan-Turkist identity among the educated strata.

The Ottoman empire’s entry into the First World War accelerated thegrowth of Turkish nationalist currents enjoying the government’s thinly veiledsupport. Membership in pan-Turkist organizations expanded (the Istanbulchapter of Türk Ocaği boasted over 2,500 members – including many women– by 1918) and their propagandist efforts (pursued through a variety of media,including lectures, plays, and films) intensified. This trend was particularlyapparent from 1916 on, when the failure of pan-Islamism to stir the Muslimsof the world had become painfully apparent, while the decisive defeat ofBritish-led forces at Gallipoli (the Allied expeditionary force was withdrawn inDecember 1915) stimulated a surge in popular patriotism among the Turkishurban population.84 During the last year of the war, Britain’s gains inMesopotamia and steady advance into Palestine–Syria made the collapse ofRussia to the north seem all the more providential: leaders such as Enver, whoserved as Ottoman war minister from 1914 to 1918, looked to a conquest ofTranscaucasia and Turkestan as an imminently realizable objective that wouldnot only compensate the empire for the loss of its Arab provinces, but allow itto reconstitute itself as a pan-Turkist superstate. Enver’s fedaîler played anactive role as agents trying to stir up rebellions among the Turkic peoples ofRussia, as well as among Turkic and other Muslim groups as far afield as Iran,Afghanistan, and British-ruled India.85 Enver went so far as to transfer unitsaway from the collapsing Middle Eastern fronts in 1917–1918 in order to pressforward into Transcaucasia, where the Musavat Party of Azerbaijan organizedactive collaboration with the Ottoman forces. Pan-Turkism, then, was not justa propaganda device; it was a political ideology that came to dominate theCUP’s definition of state interest during the Ottoman empire’s last years.Enver was to continue chasing his pan-Turkist dream after the war, assuming


the leadership of anti-Bolshevik guerrilla forces (Basmachis) in Turkestan, wherehe met a violent end in 1922.86

While the grandiose ideal of pan-Turkism came to dominate the externaloutlook of the CUP’s wartime leadership, these years also witnessed domesticpolicy initiatives that can best be described as Turkish nation-building efforts.Legislation introduced in 1916 further encroached upon the already limitedjuridical sphere of Muslim religious courts, consolidating civil authority in thehands of the state – and giving the lie to the pan-Islamic propaganda line thathad, by now, virtually been abandoned.87 In the economic arena, the govern-ments of all major belligerents in the Great War found it necessary to undertakeunprecedented interventions designed (with varying degrees of success) tomarshal resources, allocate raw materials to key industries, ration supplies, andcontrol inflation. In the Ottoman case, such efforts fell under the rubric of anambitious nationalist agenda that promoted the consolidation of Turkish controlover the Anatolian economy. The long-resented Capitulations (see Chapter 2)were abrogated as soon as war had broken out in Europe. This was followed upin the course of the war by initiatives designed to establish state supervision ofthe economy along proto-corporatist lines. State control, in turn, was employedin an effort to boost the economic power, entrepreneurial initiative, and technicalskills of ethnic Turks. Differential tariff regimes were designed to shelter nascentdomestic industries in selected manufacturing sectors; the state invested capital inthe formation of new, Turkish-run banks and corporations, while encouragingthe growth of ethnic-Turkish manufacturing and trading cooperatives and joint-stock companies; selected factory workers and peasants were sent to Germany tolearn modern manufacturing and farming techniques. This was a nationalistétatisme designed to foster the development of a strong Turkish-dominatedeconomic system led by a Turkish technocracy and Turkish bourgeoisie thatwould supplant the Armenian and Greek commercial classes that had longdominated the trade and financial sectors of the economy and were seen ashaving benefited from the Capitulations regime. Freeing Turkey from foreignencroachments was to go hand-in-hand with ridding it of the internal influenceof “alien” ethnic groups.88

The actual implementation of these policies was haphazard and inconsistent,and in many respects only impeded the empire’s ability to tolerate the strain of adrawn-out conflict. Government intervention in key economic sectors such as thegrain trade simply created opportunities for rapacious profiteering by peoplewith connections to the inner circle of the CUP. The incitement of mob violenceagainst Greek and Armenian merchants led to the flight of thousands and theconsequent disruption of essential commercial and financial networks; the Turkswho were encouraged to seize their abandoned property and occupy theireconomic niches could hardly transform themselves into an entrepreneurialbourgeoisie overnight. Power struggles between military and civilian authorities,patronage politics, and the flouting of central authority by regional satraps allserved to distort the vision of a streamlined, rationalized economy beyond recog-nition. The army’s insatiable demand for manpower and provisions disrupted


harvests, drained the rural economy, and combined with speculative grainhoarding to produce horrific deprivation and famine in Anatolia – which lostapproximately 20 per cent of its population – as it did elsewhere in the empire,ultimately undermining the material backbone of the war effort itself.

Such profound difficulties only intensified the regime’s quest for ideologicalmechanisms that could help sustain popular commitment to the war. Pan-Turkism was something of a double-edged sword in this respect, for while itprovided a stirring rationale for pressing onward against the Russians, it alsocould be attacked insofar as it suggested that the already sorely pressed AnatolianTurks needed to share their resources with their soon-to-be-liberatedTranscaucasian and Central Asian brothers. A separate propaganda line wasaccordingly developed that extolled the unique virtues and unparalleled patrioticsacrifices of Anatolian Turks. In light of the tremendous strain that conscriptionand requisitions were imposing on the Turkish peasantry, the CUP founded anorganization called Halka Doğru (Toward the People) that romanticized thepeasant lifestyle as the ideal manifestation of Turkish national character, in amanner reminiscent of the Russian populist tradition. In practice, however,participation in, and attendance at, the activities sponsored by Halka Doğru wasessentially limited to urban, educated people. The organizers of Halka Doğrucould talk rhapsodically about the peasant masses, but – like the Russian populistsbefore them – found it difficult to communicate with them.89

Imbuing the masses with a new cultural and political identity based on unfa-miliar intellectual constructs was an elusive goal; negative integration throughthe manipulation of ethnic tensions seemed to promise much more immediaterewards by channeling social tensions and resentments over wartime hardshipsaway from the government. The systematic victimization of minorities became astock-in-trade of the Young Turk regime during the war, and Enver’s fedaîlerappear to have been responsible for some of the most notorious episodes. Soonafter the Balkan Wars, the fedaîler had been organized into a secret-operationsunit called the Teşkilât-i Mahsusa (Special Organization), which answered toEnver’s personal command. Teşkilât-i Mahsusa – whose core units were domi-nated by ethnic Turks, with regional auxiliary forces recruited from the Kurdishpopulation in eastern Anatolia and Bedouin in Iraq – operated as a dirty-opera-tions unit for Enver Pasha during the First World War. It carried out commandooperations and guerrilla warfare against the British in Egypt and Iraq, whileengaging in political assassinations and ethnic cleansing on the home front. Theorganization not only helped instigate the riots against the Greek and Armeniancommercial classes in Anatolia’s urban centers, but is also thought to have playeda central role in organizing the wartime genocide of Anatolia’s Armenian popu-lation.90

The outbreak of war with Russia immediately placed the Armenians in adangerous position, as they straddled the frontier with the tsarist empire.Armenians on the Russian side of the border formed a special volunteer corps tofight the Ottoman army with a view to achieving the Dashnaktsutiun’s goal ofArmenian national self-determination. Despite the expressions of loyalty and


commitment to the Ottoman war effort on the part of the Ottoman Armeniancommunity’s official leadership, the CUP’s inner circle clearly regarded the pres-ence of a potentially hostile population on the frontline as a potential menace. Inthe spring of 1915, an Armenian uprising broke out in the province of Van.Although nationalist activists had been trying to foment a rebellion, it seems thatthe revolt itself may have come in response to unprovoked anti-Armenian atroci-ties that had already taken place in the vicinity. In any event, the concertednature of the CUP’s response suggests that a plan of action had been ready wellin advance of the Van uprising. Armenians throughout eastern Anatolia (not justthe northeast provinces) were deported en masse to the Syrian desert under condi-tions that ensured massive loss of life. Kurdish peasant-soldiers and Teşkilât-iMahsusa auxiliaries were incited to massacre the deportees along much of theirroute, and the result was the almost total eradication of Armenians from theirtraditional homeland. The number who died is conservatively estimated to havebeen between 600,000 and 800,000, and may well have been in excess of onemillion.91

The atrocities of 1915 should not be viewed simply as excesses associatedwith the clumsy implementation of improvised, wartime security measures.Strong indirect evidence suggests that leading figures within the governing circleof the CUP were responsible for deliberately turning the deportation into whatamounted to genocide. The activities of Armenian radical activists in Anatoliamay have served as a pretext for the regime’s actions, but the geographic scopeof the “deportations” and the scale of the killings suggest that they representedpart of a sinister experiment in socio-political engineering designed to transformthe demographic composition of Anatolia in line with radical pan-Turkist ideas.For the Young Turk leadership, the presence of a large Armenian populationwithin the empire constituted a perennial opportunity for Great Power interven-tion in the Ottoman state’s internal affairs. More fundamentally, the Armenianswere seen as an unassimilable element that stood in the way of national integra-tion and that constituted an unwelcome buffer between the Turks of Anatoliaand the Turkic peoples of the Caucasus. The authorities may have convincedthemselves that the deportations and massacres were essential for the successfulprosecution of the war, but they may also have seen the war effort as a goldenopportunity for pursuing a genocidal approach to national homogenization thatwould have been unthinkable in peacetime.92

Many of the nationalist policies pursued by the CUP were monumentallydisastrous for the empire’s war effort, yet laid the foundation for MustafaKemal’s (Atatürk’s) subsequent reinvention of Turkish nationalism. The YoungTurks’ economic nationalism destroyed vital Greek and Armenian commercialnetworks and created opportunities for rampant profiteering by a small numberof well-connected Turkish merchants while the rest of the population suffered.Yet these policies formed the basic mold for the étatisme and nurturance of anethnic-Turkish bourgeoisie that became the hallmarks of the postwar Turkishrepublic’s economic policy. Pan-Turkism was an ideological mirage thatdistracted the empire’s elites from the harsh realities of military defeat in the


Middle East and economic disaster on the home front. But Anatolian–Turkishnationalism rested on a firmer foundation of genuine patriotic enthusiasmamong the urban population, especially in the wake of Britain’s defeat atGallipoli. Moreover, the wartime proliferation of clubs and organizationsdevoted to one form or another of Turkish nationalism created an institutionalnetwork that served as a framework for the organization of resistance to theAllied occupation forces following the defeat of the empire and the flight of theYoung Turk leaders. Although Atatürk distanced himself from the legacy of theCUP in the aftermath of Ottoman defeat and presented himself as the father ofa reborn Turkish nation, it is now widely recognized that much of the ideologicaland institutional infrastructure of Turkish nationhood was created by thewartime policies of the CUP.93 What we see in retrospect is the curious spectacleof an empire’s leadership trying to reinvent its state as a nation, destroying theempire in the process, and thus creating an opportunity for a successor statepartially to realize its vision.

One of the fundamental contradictions faced by the Young Turks in theirnation-building endeavors was that, until the final stages of the war, half theterritory of their empire was populated by Arabs. Although the Arab provinceswere lost in battle with the British rather than breaking away in rebellion, thereis no question that the conditions of the Young Turks’ wartime rule alienatedsignificant sectors of Arab societies. More importantly for the long run, wartimeabuses provided the essential ingredients for the creation of a myth of Arabmartyrdom and resistance that was to form a legitimizing framework for Arabnationalism in subsequent years.

The Suppression of Dissent in the Arab Lands

The impact of the war on mass consciousness among the Arabs is very difficultto assess; there is a budding literature on mass political culture in Syria,Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq in the aftermath of the conflict, but little materialon the war years themselves. The Ottoman war effort took a heavy toll on thepopulations of the Arab Middle East, as it did on the empire’s other populations.The combination of mass conscription, exorbitant tax rates, ruthless requisi-tioning, and Allied blockade wreaked economic havoc that was exacerbated bythe speculative hoarding of grain by landlords. Famine and disease werewidespread in the Levant (present-day Syria and Lebanon) causing hundreds ofthousands of deaths. Material conditions were also very difficult in Mesopotamia(Iraq), where Turkish-commanded forces were engaged in a grueling campaignagainst an invading British–Indian army. The pre-war trend toward centraliza-tion and Turkification of the empire’s administration accelerated sharply: JemalPasha, Ottoman navy minister and a member of the Young Turk triumviratethat ran the empire, assumed personal control of the territories comprisinglatter-day Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Transjordan, and proceeded to appointhis cronies to posts that had long been held by local notables.94

The oppressive burden of the Ottoman war effort contributed to the sporadic


outbreak of popular revolts, especially among members of the Shi‘ite Muslimunderclass in places such as the Ba‘albek region in present-day Lebanon and thetown of Najaf in Mesopotamia. Although members of the nationalist secretsocieties helped lead some of these outbreaks, they remained localized, isolatedaffairs, that were easily suppressed by the Ottoman military. (During GeneralAllenby’s military advance into Syria in 1918, armed uprisings did begin tobreak out on a wider scale behind Turkish lines.) It was only among the disaf-fected members of urban elites that any kind of geographically broadinfrastructure existed for the systematic coordination of anti-Ottoman activitiesabove and beyond the limited arena of local politics. The secret societies, al-Fatat and al-‘Ahd, were the principal fora for such conspiracies.

The wartime intensification of the CUP’s abuses of power had deepened thesense of bitterness among those members of Arab notable families, usually theyounger sons, who were being denied opportunities for upward mobility thattheir elders had been able to take for granted just a few years earlier. Theresponsibilities, perquisites, and status of holding public office were no longertheirs for the taking as the CUP extended its direct bureaucratic control over theregion and as Jemal Pasha set up his own patronage system. The members of al-Fatat and al-‘Ahd readily linked their personal feelings of humiliation andfrustration to the broader notion that Arab society as a whole – of which theywere the natural leaders – was being oppressed. An Ottoman victory in the warcould only make matters worse, for it would inevitably strengthen the grip of theYoung Turks over the empire and lessen the prospects of political reform. Thenotion that the Arabs should break away altogether from the Ottoman empire toform an independent state, or confederation of states, thus gained groundamong the tiny, but tightly knit, circles of the secret societies, whose wartimemembership rose from less than 100 to nearly 200.

Like the founders of the Young Turk movement before them, the leaders ofthe Arab secret societies sought to broaden their circle of support by drawingmilitary officers into their movement. Contacts were established with Arab offi-cers in the Ottoman army as well as Bedouin chiefs in the hope of stimulating ananti-Ottoman uprising from within the ranks of the military and among thetribal groups. The chances of success for such a revolt would be increasedimmeasurably if it could be coordinated with British military operations. It wasin the context of these plans that Faisal, son of the Sharif of Mecca, was secretlysworn in as a member of al-‘Ahd in 1915, during the first of his two wartimevisits to Damascus. This was to set the stage for the revolt of the Hejaz, as wewill see in Chapter 5.

In Syria itself, however, Jemal Pasha struck preemptive blows against thenationalist movement by hanging dozens of suspected nationalists in Beirut andDamascus, mostly on charges of collusion with the enemy stemming from theirpre-war contacts with French and British diplomats. He also took the precau-tionary step of transferring a number of suspect Arab army divisions away fromSyria. Even had it not been for these measures, it is highly unlikely that anarmed rebellion would have had much prospect of success within Syria. The


number of army officers in contact with the nationalists represented a minutefraction of the Syrian officer corps, and the very secrecy of organizations such asal-Fatat had limited their ability to agitate or propagandize on a mass scale.Among the dominant Sunni Muslim community, the official Ottoman call forIslamic solidarity against the British resonated at least as strongly as the notion ofa distinctly Arab national destiny.

Although Jemal Pasha’s repressions intensified anti-Turkish sentiments in theArab world and provided material for the development of a nationalist marty-rology propagated by Arab nationalist regimes in the aftermath of the Ottomanempire’s defeat, most Arab notables remained loyal to the Ottoman empire tothe very end. A prominent example is that of Sati‘ al-Husri, born in Yemen toSyrian parents in 1882. A graduate of the Mülkiye (the top Ottoman administra-tive college) who was more fluent in Ottoman Turkish than in Arabic, al-Husriwas to become a leading pan-Arab nationalist ideologue in the interwar years(see Chapter 7). Before the First World War, however, he had made a name forhimself as an ardent defender of liberal, multiethnic Ottomanism who hadattacked Ziya Gökalp for his narrow, organicist conception of Turkish nation-alism. During the First World War, al-Husri held the post of Director ofEducation in Syria, and though he may have had contact with members of al-Fatat, there is no evidence at all that he supported their activities. Likewise, Yasinal-Hashimi, who was to become a leading figure in Faisal’s short-lived Syriangovernment and subsequently in the Iraqi regime, served loyally as an Ottomanmilitary commander until the final collapse of the empire. The journalist Kurd‘Ali, who had been active in Arab nationalist circles before the war, avoided anyhint of disloyalty toward Istanbul during the war and was reduced, in hismemoirs, to defensively insisting that he never denounced any of his nationalistcolleagues in the course of his many friendly encounters with Jemal Pasha, andthat he sought to intercede on behalf of those activists who had been sentencedto death.95 Among the urban notables of Mesopotamia (Iraq), there was evenless support for a complete break with Istanbul than among the Syrian elite.96

But although Ottoman power in the Arab lands was defeated by Britisharmed might rather than by indigenous revolution, wartime events did help setthe stage for the postwar development of Arab nationalism. Even though therole played by Arab nationalist organizations in the defeat of the Ottomanempire was practically nil, they provided an ideological and organizationalkernel around which a more powerful nationalist movement could coalesce inthe wake of the postwar partition of the Ottoman empire into League ofNations mandates administered by the British and French. More importantly,perhaps, the war furnished opportunities for creating powerful myths of nationalresistance. The hangings of political activists by Jemal Pasha were to become onemajor focal point of nationalist hagiography. But, as we shall see in Chapter 5,center stage in the nationalist drama was held by the political and military lead-ership of the Arab Revolt, whose springboard lay not in the urban centers of theFertile Crescent, but on the periphery of the Ottoman empire, in the breakawayprovince of the Hejaz.


Conclusion

The war left no social class or ethnic group in the Habsburg, Romanov, andOttoman empires unaffected. Its destruction of lives and property and its disrup-tion of any sense of predictability and order deepened pre-existing grievancesand accentuated conflicts across a variety of fault lines. The millions of thosewhose response was one of complete despair, or who focussed their entire beingson the overwhelming task of day-to-day survival, left little direct imprint on poli-tics – although their very political passivity or alienation could have significantrepercussions in the postwar world. But there were many who were drawn intooppositional political activity at a variety of levels and in a multiplicity of forms,ranging from the expression of anti-war or anti-government sentiments in theirprivate correspondence to participation in political movements, public demon-strations, and armed revolts. The common denominator among virtually all thepolitical responses to the war was that they expressed ardent hope for radicalchange, for a fundamental transformation of the social or political order – atransformation profound enough to lend meaning to the tremendous sacrifices ofthe conflict and/or to ensure that such a disaster never happened again.

Among many of the subject peoples of multinational empires, the idea ofnational self-determination gained broader and more intense appeal as a poten-tial framework for the realization of popular aspirations. But the ostensibleuniformity of nationalist sentiment could be misleading, for within it wereembedded a bewildering diversity of socio-economic agendas, political ideolo-gies, and definitions of identity. Notions of what constituted the nation, whobelonged to it, where its demographic and geographic boundaries should lie, andwhat social tranformations must take place as part of its liberation, varied widely.The broad, federative schemes or pan-nationalist visions of nationalist intelli-gentsias and urban middle classes often clashed with territorially and ethnicallymore circumscribed conceptions of political identity among peasant populations.This gap was frequently linked to a disparity between nationalist elites’ preoccu-pation with gaining a dignified role for the nation on the world stage andpopular interest in more concrete issues of social justice and the redistribution ofresources. Thus, Croatia’s urban population turned sharply toward Yugoslavismin the last two years of the war, while the restive peasantry harbored dreams of aCroat socialist republic. Ukrainian nationalist leaders were eager to gain politicalautonomy as an end unto itself, while for the Ukrainian peasantry self-govern-ment was thought of in more instrumental terms as a means of securing afavorable framework for land reform. The liberal reformers of the Jadid move-ment sought to create national cultural institutions for Russia’s Muslims on apan-Turkist basis, only to encounter anti-Tatar sentiments and ethno-regionalparticularism among representatives of the Central Asian and Transcaucasianprovinces. The members of al-Fatat and al-‘Ahd aspired to create a single inde-pendent state encompassing most of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman empire,but the sporadic outbreaks of popular violence in Syria and Mesopotamia, aswell as the participation of the Bedouin rank-and-file in the Arab Revolt (see


Chapter 5), can most easily be understood as expressions of local and tribalinterests and loyalties.

During the final countdown to the collapse and/or military defeat of themultinational empires, rapidly intensifying nationalist sentiments, indecisivenessand loss of confidence among the political authorities, and administrative break-down all reinforced each other in what became an inescapable vicious circle.Eleventh-hour efforts to appease nationalist feelings – such as Kaiser Karl’sOctober 1918 offer to federalize the Habsburg monarchy or the RussianProvisional Government’s promise of varying and ill-defined forms of autonomyto Russia’s national minorities – only served to invigorate separatist impulses bycreating frameworks within which they could more readily be acted out or byraising expectations that could not really be accommodated within the existingpolitical order. Their inability to control such centrifugal forces added to thedemoralization and disorientation of the central authorities, and in many casesleft them unwilling to use whatever power remained at their disposal to try andrestore order.

As they departed the scene, the multinational empires took with them thelongstanding geopolitical frames of reference within which national identitieshad evolved. For some groups, this meant a removal of limitations under whichthey had chafed; this was the case for Yugoslavists who could now openlyembrace the goal of uniting the South Slav provinces of Austria–Hungary withthe kingdom of Serbia. By contrast, ethnic leaderships that had espoused theideal of ethnic autonomy within a multinational, federal framework now foundthemselves cast adrift with no apparent alternative to political independence; thiswas briefly the experience of Georgia’s Mensheviks and of the mainstream Arabpolitical elites. And everywhere, the elimination of overarching imperial struc-tures left the field open to violent contestation of the boundaries of nationalidentity.

In this chapter, we have focussed on the dynamics of nationalism withinempires at war. Before turning to the aftermath of empire, we must shift ourattention to the novel, extra-imperial arenas for nationalist activism that werecreated by the war.


The force fields of separatist nationalism were not entirely congruent with, orcontained within, the borders of imperial states, nor was the wartime evolutionof ethno-national identities shaped exclusively by the internal political dynamicsof the multinational monarchies. Successful challenges to political authority inone empire could set powerful precedents for discontented elements in othermonarchies; we have already seen how strong an impression the revolutionaryturmoil in Russia made on a broad array of ethnic groups and social strata inAustria–Hungary. But the war did not merely intensify the power of example; itbrought into being new geopolitical frames of reference and arenas of actionwithin which nationalist experiments could be undertaken and hithertomarginalized programs propagated and developed to an unprecedented degree.

This chapter focusses on three such wartime spheres of nationalist experi-mentation and improvisation. One is the military occupation zone – of whichthe most important examples are the German occupation zones in EasternEurope. The second is the politics of exile – not a new dimension in and of itself,but one that gained new significance and influence in the context of the war andits immediate aftermath. The third frame of action is that of the volunteerlegions that were formed either in wartime exile or in occupation zones. Each ofthese fora lay outside the established frameworks of multinational empires, andfor much of the war what transpired there seemed to have little significance forthe development of the nationalities problems within the imperial polities. But asthe imperial edifices came crashing to the ground in 1917–1918, many elementsthat had been confined to the wings suddenly appeared poised to occupy centerstage.

Zones of Occupation

Poland and Lithuania

The successful German-led Eastern offensive of 1915, which rolled Russianforces back along a broad front stretching from eastern Galicia to the Baltic,created a new sphere of administrative ambiguity and political uncertainty in thelarge stretch of territory that was wrenched away from the Russian empire. The

5 New Arenas of ActionNationalisms of Occupation andExile, 1914–1918

bulk of Russian Poland was divided between German and Habsburg occupationzones (with headquarters in Warsaw and Lublin, respectively). The Germanoccupation zone was administered by General Beseler, who answered directly tothe authority of the Kaiser. To the north, a zone designated as Ober Ost (UpperEast) – roughly corresponding to the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania andincluding urban centers such as Kaunas and Vilnius – came under the direct andexclusive jurisdiction of the German Supreme Command in the East.1

Large question marks hung over the future disposition and status of theseterritories. German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg entertained the hope ofusing Germany’s gains to negotiate a separate peace with Russia, but wasunwilling to retreat to the pre-war border and faced strong pressure fromGenerals Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who assumed overall command ofGermany’s armies in August 1916, to extend Germany’s sphere of control evenfurther east. The Habsburg authorities toyed with the idea of merging CongressPoland with Galicia in a Polish kingdom that would form an autonomous entityunder the Habsburg crown, but Berlin had no intention of allowing its venerablepartner to profit on such a grand scale from a successful military campaign thathad been spearheaded by German forces. Talks between Vienna and Berlinculminated in a joint November 1916 proclamation of an “independent” Polishkingdom under the interim authority of a Provisional State Council appointedby the German military authorities in Warsaw. To the north, Ober Ost remainedunder the direct administration of the German Eastern Command.

The German authorities had no carefully designed blueprint for the absorp-tion of these occupied regions into their hegemonic sphere. Their policies borethe marks of hasty improvisation and conflicting calculations. But a commonthread running throughout the Germans’ wartime activity in Eastern Europewas their confrontation with the reality of the population’s multinational compo-sition and their ensuing struggle to find a way of turning various manifestationsof ethnic consciousness into conduits for the dissemination of German influence.The diverse attempts to achieve this all backfired in the end, but in the process,the Germans played a greater – if often unwitting – role in shaping the politicsof East European nationalism than did Woodrow Wilson.2

The longstanding Polish aspirations for a restoration of national sovereigntyconstituted the most obvious and visible issue to contend with. In the course oftheir 1915 military campaign, the Germans had presented themselves in theirpropaganda as liberators who would free Poland from its subjugation to Russia.3

By creating the framework for a sovereign Polish kingdom in November 1916,the Germans and Habsburgs did briefly succeed in gaining the active politicalcooperation of a certain segment of the Polish socio-political elite, as well as ofJózef Piłsudski and his followers, who had returned to Warsaw from theirGalician exile in the wake of the Russians’ withdrawal. Piłsudski’s anti-Russianorientation seemed to make him a natural partner for the Germans in theirattempt to forge an alliance with Polish nationalism, and he agreed to join theProvisional State Council.

However, it soon became clear that Berlin had nothing more in mind than a

New Arenas of Action, 1914–1918 117

compliant Polish puppet state that would do the Germans’ bidding and devoteits efforts to the mobilization of Polish resources and manpower on behalf of theGerman war effort. As we shall see below, Piłsudski responded by turning fromcooperation to resistance, finally resigning from the State Council in July 1917and being imprisoned by the Germans shortly thereafter. When the remainingmembers of the Provisional State Council resigned two months later, theGermans tried to salvage their credibility by designating a new Regency Councilas the sovereign authority for Poland pending the crowning of a monarch.Dominated by a handful of conservative, aristocratic figures still willing tocollaborate with the Germans, this body failed to gain any significant measure ofpolitical support. But by creating an institutional precedent for Polish indepen-dence on the one hand, while frustrating nationalist aspirations on the other, theGermans had laid the groundwork for Piłsudski’s triumphant assumption ofpower in November 1918 (see below). Moreover, the economic hardships andpolitical failures experienced under the conservative leadership of the RegencyCouncil, offset by the wartime expansion of both public and clandestine activi-ties by Polish mutual aid societies and mass-oriented political parties, helpedfoster broad-based, popular support for Polish national self-determination undera republican form of government.

Meanwhile, Ober Ost was administered by the German Supreme Command inthe East as its own colonial enterprise, a political laboratory where it couldexperiment with the manipulation and reconfiguration of the local politicaleconomy, ethnic identities, and cultural values. The successful establishment ofGerman political and cultural hegemony here might serve as an instructivemodel elsewhere, as victorious German armies carried the banner of Kultur everfurther eastwards.4 No single ethnic group clearly dominated this region, whichcontained a bewildering mix of Lithuanians, Poles, Jews, Belorussians, andothers. Initially uncertain over how to bring order to this ethno-cultural carnival,the Germans soon developed a divide-and-rule strategy that was designed notjust to maximize their control, but to facilitate the transformation of the landand its peoples in the German image.

The most distinctive feature of this multifaceted – and often self-contradictory– approach was the attempt to facilitate the crystallization of standardizednational cultures among all of the region’s ethnic groups. Rather than enshriningone language as Ober Ost’s official tongue, the German military administration inKaunas encouraged the use of all locally spoken languages. In the face of dialectvariation within a speech community, the Germans endeavored to promote auniform standard. The establishment of school systems for each ethnic groupwould contribute to the remolding of peasant populations that had hitherto hadlittle exposure to any form of written culture. Official decrees were issued in sevendifferent languages by the military administration’s press section, whose staff oftranslators were also responsible for publishing newspapers in local languages aspropaganda vehicles for the Ober Ost command. Official identification cards were

118 New Arenas of Action, 1914–1918

issued to every individual in the territory, each printed in its bearer’s own nativetongue.

The cumulative – and intended – effect of these policies was to institution-alize ethnic identity in Ober Ost to an unprecedented degree. But this approachwas not the expression of a refined multicultural sensibility among the Germanofficer corps. Rather, it stemmed from the notion that clearly structured cate-gories of identity constituted an essential aspect of a modern society and,furthermore, that the consolidation of ethno-national frames of reference wouldfacilitate the dissemination of German social and cultural values. As V.G.Liulevicius has argued, the Ober Ost authorities saw the transformation of landuse patterns (combining scientific principles of agronomy with idiosyncraticallyGerman notions about the taming and cultivation of nature) and the reshapingof the land’s native peoples as complementary elements in a project of inte-grating the region into the German political-cultural realm. Drawing cleardistinctions between overlapping ethnic identities and furthering the develop-ment of a standardized culture (through publications, cultural exhibits, craftsfairs, and theatrical productions in indigenous languages) for each nationality,would all serve to bring the population in line with German ideas about what amodern society should look like. This process of modernization would itselfmake each ethnic group more receptive to German ideas about disciplined workhabits, bureaucratic regimentation, and respect for authority and the rule of law.The use of native tongues to diffuse such ideas would make them seem less alienand more readily comprehensible; at the same time, the study of German wouldbecome compulsory in every ethnic group’s schools. In brief, the policy repre-sented an attempt to create cultures that were national in form, but Germanic incontent.5 In fact, the similarity to later Soviet efforts to create cultures “nationalin form, socialist in content” is so striking that one cannot help wonderingwhether Lenin’s and Stalin’s nationalities policies (see Chapter 6) were influencedby this precedent – as Bolshevik War Communism was influenced by the modelof the German war economy.6

This utopian (or dystopian) program for socio-cultural modernization ranafoul of numerous obstacles and pitfalls. Not least among these were theexploitative aspects of Ober Ost’s own policies, as dictated by considerations ofwartime expediency and as facilitated by the myriad opportunities for abuse ofpower inherent in the very nature of a military-occupation regime. Tens of thou-sands of men from all ethnic groups were dragged off to perform forced labor,leaving their families with little or no means of support. Massive requisitions ofgrain and livestock left agricultural communities destitute. Rigid bureaucraticcontrols on internal travel and commercial activity caused economic fragmenta-tion and aggravated material hardships, as well as contributing to the growth ofa black market and smuggling trade whose effective functioning depended on thevenality of German soldiers and officers.7


Lithuanian nationalism comes of age

The impact of this self-contradictory pattern of governance was indeed to rein-force the centrality of ethnicity as a framework for collective action and mutualsupport, but in ways that did not necessarily coincide with the purposes of OberOst’s nationalities policy. It was thus that Lithuanian nationalism came of ageunder the stimulus of German occupation. The military administrationemployed heavyhanded methods in its attempts to cultivate Lithuanianconsciousness while limiting its expression to a narrow range of approved topicsand opinions. For example, it encouraged the establishment of Lithuanianschools, then imposed a Germanophile curriculum on them; it published its ownLithuanian-language newspaper, but refused until September 1917 to permit theestablishment of an independent paper – and then sought to muzzle it throughcensorship. Such policies only served to stimulate diverse forms of resistance. Anunderground educational system spread through the countryside alongside polit-ical-mobilization and propagandist activities carried out by Lithuaniannationalists under the cover of the officially sanctioned Lithuanian Refugee AidCommittee. The severe regimen of requisitions and forced labor created a recep-tive audience for nationalist agitation among the peasantry. While much of thewartime rural unrest in Ober Ost took the form of banditry, there was at leastone incident of armed resistance that was clearly linked to clandestine nationalistactivity.8

In 1917, a new framework of activity arose for Lithuanian nationalists. It wasearly in this year that the Provisional Government came to power in Russia andthat the United States entered the war, both governments espousing the doctrineof national self-determination as the basis for a non-annexationist peace settle-ment. In July 1917, the German Reichstag (lower house of parliament) passed aresolution calling for a peace without forcible annexations. On the other hand,Russia’s military disintegration held forth the prospect of further expansion ofGerman military might in the East.

It was within this political and military context that Lithuanian politicalnationhood was summoned forth by none other than the Ober Ost authorities asthe designated vehicle for the legitimization of their imperial project. This wasdesigned to counter the impact of Russian revolutionary propaganda by demon-strating that German rule was compatible with national self-determination.Cultivation of Lithuanian nationalism could also serve to counterbalance andcontain the restive Poles.

The result was the convening of a conference in Vilnius in September 1917that elected a twenty-member council – the Taryba – considered broadly repre-sentative of Lithuanian society. Coming under intense pressure to call for unionwith Germany, the Taryba soon showed that it had a mind of its own. It madetactical concessions to the military authorities while simultaneously insisting on agreater measure of autonomy for Lithuania than Ober Ost was prepared togrant. In February 1918, in protest over the exclusion of Lithuanians frominvolvement in Germany’s peace negotiations with the Bolsheviks, the Tarybadeclared Lithuania independent, separately reaffirming a previous commitment


Map 2 The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and the First World War in Eastern Europe, 1918

Source: Richard and Ben Crampton, Atlas of Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 1996)

to maintaining military and economic union with Germany. An awkward polit-ical dance ensued, with the military authorities cracking down hard on openmanifestations of dissent, while the Taryba tried to circumvent the Ober Ostsystem by employing political ties with sympathetic elements among the CatholicCenter Party in the German Reichstag to gain the Kaiser’s formal, if condi-tional, recognition of Lithuanian independence in March 1918. This had fewpractical implications as long as the German military remained in effectivecontrol, but with the collapse of the German war effort in November, thisskeletal framework for self-government could begin to take on substance. Thepoint is that, its worst intentions notwithstanding, the German occupationregime had contributed significantly to the consolidation of Lithuanian nationalidentity and the creation of an institutional framework for Lithuanian territorialindependence – and all this through policies that had been intended to mold thelocal population into pliable objects of German cultural and political imperi-alism.

The Jews under German occupation

The case of the Jews also vividly illustrates not only what a transformativeimpact the German occupation had on the development of national identities,but also how varied the modes of influence were. While every Europeancountry had a Jewish minority, the East European lands that fell to theGermans in 1915 formed part of an extensive swath of territory containing thelargest concentration of Jewish population on the continent; Jews constitutedapproximately 10 per cent of the area’s general population, and often 30 to 50per cent of the population in towns and cities. The ethno-cultural distinctivenessof most East European Jews was manifest in every aspect of their existence –religion, language, dress, occupational patterns, neighborhoods. What theGerman occupation did was to create opportunities for the development and/orexpansion of modern institutional, political, and cultural frameworks for theexpression of Jewish identity in its multiplicity of forms and orientations. Thiswas the case both in Ober Ost and in German- and Austrian-occupied Poland.9

The most immediate and obvious impact of German occupation on Jewishlife in the region was the relief it offered from the systematic wartime persecu-tion of the Russian authorities, who had treated Jews as potential spies, sent tensof thousands of them from border regions into internal exile, banned correspon-dence and publication in Hebrew letters, and physically destroyed numerousJewish settlements and neighborhoods during the Russian army’s retreat in1915.10 Just as German propaganda in 1914–1915 promised the Poles a betterlot under the Kaiser’s benevolent hand, so too did it play on the theme ofRussian abuses to win Jewish sympathy for the Central Powers’ cause.11 Theintroduction of German military rule was associated with abuses of its own, butthese took the form of an equal-opportunity system of exploitation that, at leastofficially, did not single out the Jews for harsher treatment. Moreover, because ofthe linguistic affinity between Yiddish and German, a disproportionate number


of Jews were employed as interpreters and in other low-level clerical roles in theGerman occupation regimes.12

German occupation not only brought an end to Russia’s 1915 ban onHebrew and Yiddish publication, but created unprecedented opportunities forJewish cultural innovation and political activism. In Ober Ost, the occupationregime’s unusual nationalities policy meant that Yiddish was recognized as theofficial language of the Jews, and that Jews were encouraged to develop amodern, Yiddish-language school system as well as Jewish vocational schools anda number of Hebrew-language schools.13 In Poland, the Germans’ attempt tocurry favor with Polish nationalists led to the designation of the Jewish minorityas a religious group rather than a nationality. Yet here too, German rule createdunprecedented opportunities for the development of new Jewish educational andcultural institutions.14

In the political realm, German reforms in municipal election proceduresbroadened the franchise and opened up the playing field to fuller participationby Jewish socialist and Zionist parties whose scope of action had been severelycircumscribed by the tsarist regime. This, along with such parties’ involvement inrefugee assistance and relief work, created the opportunity for their rapid expan-sion into mass movements. The General Zionist Party’s success in reaching themasses was marked by its collection of 238,000 signatures on a 1917 petition insupport of the Jewish claim to Palestine.15 The founding of other Jewish politicalparties – notably the Orthodox Agudat Israel – that were to play significant rolesin Poland during the interwar years also took place under the German occupa-tion regime.16

This pattern of German administrative initiatives and Jewish responsesconstituted but one strand in a thick web of social, cultural, and political interac-tions between occupiers and occupied. Rival German-Jewish organizations,whose ideological orientations ranged from assimilationism, to religiousOrthodoxy, to Zionism, sent relief missions, investigatory and advisory groups,and teachers to the Jews of the occupied East, stimulating and reinforcing localinitiatives. In efforts that paralleled the political activity of some highly placedAustrian and Prussian Poles and a handful of Prussian Lithuanians on behalf oftheir respective national causes,17 German Jews lobbied the German govern-ment and occupation authorities on behalf of their own various policyrecommendations (that ranged from programs for the Germanization ofYiddish-speaking Jewry to advocacy of national-cultural autonomy for the Jewsof the East).18 Intercession by German-Jewish officers in the Ober Ost adminis-tration’s Press Section facilitated the establishment of the first major modernistYiddish theater in Vilnius (the Vilna Troupe)19 and enabled the company to tourthe entire Lithuanian–Polish region, bypassing normal travel restrictions.20

Many of the above initiatives were elements in a general tendency towardvertical integration on the part of rival ideological movements, each of whichclaimed to embody the essence of Jewish identity. By vertical integration, I referto the creation and consolidation of school systems, youth movements, pressorgans, and other cultural and social institutions under the aegis of mass-


oriented political parties. Many of these initiatives were necessarily fragile andlimited in scope under conditions of wartime occupation, but they createdmodern institutional frameworks for the development of a multifaceted Jewishnational-cultural life in interwar Poland.

Synopsis

The German occupation of Russian Poland and Lithuania thus served to lendnew impetus to the crystallization of ethno-national identities and/or to theconsolidation of modern political and institutional expressions of identity amongthe diverse peoples of the region. It played this catalyzing role in a variety ofways, both indirect and direct. For one thing, harsh and exploitative though theywere, the German occupation regimes in Ober Ost and Poland were in somerespects less politically and culturally repressive than the tsarist authorities hadbeen. By introducing a semblance of the rule of law,21 the Germans facilitatedthe growth of new frameworks and opportunities for various forms of communalself-organization and cultural experimentation.

In Ober Ost, the German military deliberately imposed an ethno-culturalgrid (to paraphrase Liulevicius) on its new subjects, promoting the crystallizationof mutually exclusive categories of collective identity. While these policies wereintended to promote the transmission of German norms and values and to rein-force German hegemony over the population, they were implemented in ahaphazard and inconsistent manner and rarely served the purpose they weredesigned for. The bureaucratization of cultural policy was a process that lentitself to subtle forms of subversion, as in the case of the melamdim (Torahteachers in traditional Jewish schools) summoned to Kaunas from surroundingsmall towns for a certification course taught by German-Jewish instructors. The“melamdim” enrolled in the class turned out to be petty traders who had misrepre-sented themselves as a means of obtaining travel permits so as to market theirwares in the big city.22 The Lithuanian Taryba’s refusal to play the docile roleexpected of it by the German authorities is a more dramatic example ofGerman ethno-political manipulation being turned on its head. Sympatheticelements within the German military administration and in the Reichstag alsoaided in the carving out of small but significant niches of cultural autonomy onthe part of subject communities in the occupied lands.

Finally, the self-contradictory qualities of German policy in Lithuania andPoland, which fostered ethno-cultural awareness and/or self-government on theone hand while withholding any substantive form of national self-determinationon the other, and which purported to be directed at the betterment of localconditions while in practice severely aggravating the already intense materialhardships of wartime, served to fan the flames of resistance. This ran the gamutfrom spontaneous manifestations – such as the hit-and-run attacks on Germantroops carried out by armed bands of Lithuanian men evading forced laborservice23 – to clandestine activities undertaken by disciplined organizations suchas Piłsudski’s Polish Military Organization (of which more below).


All of the above factors contributed to an intense preoccupation on the partof Polish, Jewish, and Lithuanian communal leaders, press organs, and literatepublics with the possible prospects and forms of national self-determination inthe framework of a German-dominated Eastern Europe. With the collapse ofGerman power in 1918, Wilsonian rhetoric became the predominant frame ofreference for these debates and disputes as the contending forces brought theircases to the Paris Peace Conference. But it was in the context of the Germanand Austrian occupation of the region that concern with these matters hadengaged the interest of a broader public than ever before and that many of thekey institutional and organizational mechanisms for political and military actionand mass mobilization within each ethnic community had taken form.

Serbia

The Central Powers’ occupation of Serbia followed a different pattern from thatof Poland–Lithuania. The cultural policies pursued here were much moreunambiguously and straightforwardly repressive, and were variously designedeither to impose cultural assimilation on the Serb population or to eliminate anymeaningful form whatsoever of cultural expression. The net effect, however, wasto reinforce the Serb masses’ sense of political identity by feeding directly intotheir national myths of collective resistance and martyrdom.24

The kingdom of Serbia already was an independent nation-state long before1914, and had, of course, been directly involved in the outbreak of the war. Itmerits our attention, however, because the wartime development of its govern-ment’s political agenda and of its society’s national consciousness had long-termrepercussions for the South Slavs of Austria–Hungary.

Coming close on the heels of the country’s impressive military performancein the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, the onset of the First World War foundSerbia’s largely peasant population already gripped by powerful nationalistemotions. Indeed, among all the Balkan countries, the rural tradition of theblood feud had been effectively transposed to the level of interethnic and inter-state relations. The brutal massacres that had characterized the advance andretreat of Ottoman, Greek, Romanian, Bulgarian, Montenegrin, and Serbianarmies in 1912–1913 had left a warm, fresh batch of inter-communal vendettassteaming on the stove of Balkan politics.25

The Serbian war effort of 1914–1915 must be considered remarkable simplyby virtue of how long it lasted; it managed to ward off Austro-Hungarianconquest for a full year. With the country’s armies arrayed against the forces of aEuropean great power, this period witnessed an unprecedented marshaling ofnational resources and accompanying politicization of the population. Thegovernment undertook a propaganda effort on behalf of its official war aim ofunifying all Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes under the Serbian crown. The seat ofgovernment itself was moved south to Niš, as Belgrade came under repeatedbombardment and was briefly occupied by the Austro-Hungarians in December


1914. The atmosphere in the temporary capital was one of intense nationalistfervor, as the town became crowded with embittered Serb refugees from Bosniaand other parts of the Habsburg-ruled South Slav lands.26

Bulgaria’s entry into the war combined with the arrival of German troopreinforcements finally led to the defeat of the Serbian army by December 1915.This was itself the occasion for a great upsurge of national solidarity and collec-tive pride, however: led by the Serbian government and high command, theremnants of the army fought and marched their way across the frozen moun-tains of Albania to the Adriatic coast. Many civilians, fearful of the conquerors,accompanied this death march. Some 143,000 people perished during thisExodus, either of cold, fatigue, and famine, or at the hands of hostile Albanianpeasants. Approximately 140,000–170,000 survived to be rescued by Allied shipsthat transported the Serbian government to Corfu (over Greek objections), andthat brought Serbia’s troops to Salonika, where they participated in the openingof a new inter-Allied front against Bulgaria. The refusal of the Serbian govern-ment to surrender to the Central Powers and the fighting retreat of its armedforces reinforced the themes of heroism and martyrdom as central aspects of theSerbian nationalist self-image.

Serbian territory was divided into Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian occupa-tion zones (in the north and south of the country, respectively), while theGermans engaged in economic exploitation of the entire land. Bulgaria andAustria–Hungary intended to integrate Serbian territory into their respectivestates after the war, and they pursued cultural policies designed to further thatlong-term goal while simultaneously busying themselves with the more imme-diate task of raping the country. On the one hand, the zeal with which theoccupation authorities promoted their cultural and linguistic agendas suggestedthat they understood what a dangerous problem popular nationalism could posefor them. On the other hand, their methods of dealing with Serbian nationalismreflected a naive optimism about how easy it would be to manipulate andreshape popular identity.

The Bulgarians were particularly heavy-handed in their imposition of aprogram of cultural assimilation on their occupation zone. Their propagandaclaimed that not only Slavic Macedonians, but also ethnic Serbs, were in truthnothing but Bulgarians who had somehow gone astray and forgotten who theywere. All they needed was a firm hand to guide them back to the refreshingwaters of Bulgarian language and culture. The use of Serbian in all public func-tions was banned, the sale of Serbian books was declared illegal, Bulgariantheater replaced Serbian theater in occupied Niš, and Bulgarian teachers andtextbooks were brought in to transform the school system into an instrument ofcultural assimilation. A campaign was even launched to convert Serbian namesinto Bulgarian ones (in a move that foreshadowed Communist Bulgaria’s culturalwar against its Turkish minority in the 1980s).

For their part, the Austro-Hungarian authorities seemed less sure about whatthe Serbs should be transformed into. They focussed instead on trying to elimi-nate whatever distinctive ethno-cultural consciousness and political initiative the


conquered population did have. The Austrian military governor’s official instruc-tions were “to apply the utmost energy and ruthlessness about the needs of thewar and the military forces and to destroy every sign of rebellion and carry outthe most far-reaching exploitation with the firmest hand and insensitivity.”27

Thousands of members of the intelligentsia and political activists of everydescription were deported to internment camps, the University of Belgrade wasclosed down, and the use of the Cyrillic alphabet – the key feature distinguishingSerbian from Croatian – was severely curtailed. The one Serbian-languagenewspaper published in occupied Belgrade contained nothing but censored warnews, and the city’s public cultural life seemed to consist of little more thanendless performances by Austrian military bands.

Accompanied as they were by the conscription of Serbian men into theBulgarian armed forces, the expropriation of vital material resources, and violentabuses of power by their armies, the cultural and linguistic policies of the occu-pying powers served only to confirm the popular impression that their ultimateobjective was the annihilation of the Serbs as a nation. The struggle for physicalsurvival and the fight for cultural self-determination could be seen as differentaspects of the same life-and-death battle against implacable enemies. In trying toeradicate the cultural and political expressions of Serbian national identity, theAustro-Hungarians and Bulgarians merely reinforced the sense that redemptionfrom the material ravages of war could only come in the context of renewednational independence. And as long as total liberation remained a distantprospect, the secret cultivation of Serbia’s ethno-cultural heritage was a mean-ingful way of defying the enemy; the occupiers had themselves defined thecontest in such terms.

Their unusually harsh experience under occupation contributed to the Serbs’sense of exceptionalism and to their self-image as the hardy vanguard of theSouth Slav peoples. This, in turn, contributed to the widespread popularassumption that Serbs would hold pride of place in the kingdom of Serbs,Croats, and Slovenes that emerged in the wake of the war – a perspective thatwould not be shared by the other constituent peoples of the Yugoslav state.

There were many more experiences of wartime conquest and occupation thanthis section could possibly survey. The further German and Ottoman advancesinto Russian territory under the terms of the March 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk varied enormously in their impact, and do not lend themselves readily togeneralization.28 The advance of British armies into Palestine–Syria andMesopotamia inaugurated decades of Anglo-French imperial hegemony in theMiddle East, which had a formative impact on the development of the region’snation-states, as we shall see in the next chapter. But before moving fromwartime occupation to postwar boundary and identity formation, we mustconsider the impact of exile movements on the development of wartime andpostwar nationalisms.


The Politics of Exile

The experience of exile has often formed the backdrop for propagandist andconspiratorial activity on the part of revolutionaries of every description,including nationalists. Napoleon I organized a legion of Polish expatriates whofought in the ranks of the Grande Armée in the hope of helping their parti-tioned homeland regain independent status within a Bonapartist Europeanorder. During the mid-nineteenth century, Giuseppe Mazzini coordinated thepassionate if ineffectual activities of his Young Italy organization from his refugein London, while also – rather more successfully – cultivating the support ofBritish high society for the cause of Italian national unification. Other examplesfrom the nineteenth century abound.

During the First World War, this pattern became the order of the day for awide array of nationalist activists. As the European great powers engaged intheir life-and-death struggle, each of their respective territories served as apotential base of operations for malcontents from the other side. The multina-tional empires did not shy away from attempts at mutual subversion throughsupport for each other’s separatist movements. Ukrainian émigrés in Galiciaorganized a Union for the Liberation of (Russian) Ukraine (Soiuz VyzvolenniaUkrainy – SVU) in August 1914, which enjoyed limited financial support fromthe Austro-Hungarian and German governments and eventually transferred itsheadquarters to Berlin. The SVU was authorized to gain access to POW camps,where it conducted nationalist agitation among Ukrainian prisoners. BothGermany and the Habsburg empire also hosted nationalist conferences andpublication campaigns by Finnish, Muslim, and other émigrés from the Russianempire. The German government also smuggled Irish nationalist leader SirRoger Casement (as well as arms shipments) by submarine into Ireland (wherethe Easter Rising broke out in 1916) and spurred the Ottomans to conduct pan-Islamic propaganda designed to loosen Britain’s grip on Egypt and India (seeChapter 4).29 For their part, the Russians sought to undermineAustria–Hungary’s cohesion by appealing to the nationalist sentiments ofCzechs, Slovaks, and South Slavs, while to the south, they encouraged Dashnakactivists in their efforts to incite rebellion among the Armenians across theborder in the Ottoman empire.30 The Ottomans in turn sought to incite anti-Russian uprisings among the Muslim peoples of Transcaucasia as well as tocultivate contact among Georgian nationalists.31

The neutral countries also served as bases of activity for expatriate national-ists from throughout Eastern Europe who held conferences and establishedcommittees and information bureaus in Switzerland, Sweden, and other non-belligerent states. These organizations issued propagandist literature in Westernlanguages,32 organized conferences of oppressed nationalities, and lobbied theinternational diplomatic corps on behalf of their respective causes, even tryingto play the Allied and Central Powers off against each other. The direct impactof such efforts may have been minimal, but some of these committees fulfilledan important function as channels of communication – surreptitious or other-


wise – with the outside world (especially with diaspora communities in theAmericas) for activists in the zones of war and occupation.33

Of course, the gap in perspective between diaspora and native land, émigrénationalists and activists in occupied territory, could also create discord andpolitical tensions over a wide variety of issues. Exile in the Allied countriescreated the incentive and opportunity for propagating more radical or ambitiouspolitical programs than could be openly contemplated by community leadersback home, who were living under continued imperial rule or military occupa-tion.34 The gap between exile front and home front produced both synergies andtensions – a dialectical relationship that assumed center stage in the nationalistarena when these divergent wartime paths suddenly converged in 1918.

The expatriate leaders were few in number and their wartime experienceswere completely unlike those of their countrymen. Yet because they operatedout of the Allied capitals and identified themselves with the victorious Westerncause, some of them were unusually well positioned to influence the course ofevents in their homelands in the immediate aftermath of the Central Powers’defeat. Given this disproportionately significant role in the shaping of the newnation-states of 1918, their atypical wartime trajectories – and the distinctivepolitical perspectives that these experiences helped shape – demand particularattention.

The Czechoslovak National Council

The most striking example of how wartime exile in the Allied countries couldpropel a hitherto respected but relatively powerless figure into the seat of poweris that of Tomáš Masaryk. By 1914, Masaryk had come to the conclusion thatthe Austro-Hungarian state was too retrograde and authoritarian to be suscep-tible to reform. Its alignment with Wilhelmine Germany in the war onlyreinforced his sense that full independence rather than autonomy within aGerman-dominated Central Europe represented the only meaningful form ofself-determination for the Czech nation. By the same token, the war seemed toopen up the first realistic possibility of breaking up the Habsburg empire. Tothis end, in December 1914, Masaryk left Austria–Hungary for Switzerland,where he began to plan a campaign from abroad on behalf of Czech indepen-dence. Prior to his departure from Prague, he had entrusted his confidantEdvard Beneš with the responsibility of organizing an underground network ofactivists committed to working for Czech independence. Known as the Maffie,this conspiracy brought together leaders from the younger, second-tier level ofseveral parties’ leaderships as well as a variety of intellectuals and culturalfigures from outside the framework of party organizations. It functioned both asa channel for secret communication between the exiled Masaryk and his sympa-thizers in Bohemia, and as a framework of cooperation and coordinationamong those Czech politicians committed to pushing their respective partyleaderships into a more confrontational stance toward the Habsburg authorities.For instance, the Maffie helped organize the pressure campaign that led to the


radicalization of the Czech Union’s political platform in the course of1917–1918 (see Chapter 3).35

Following Beneš’ own departure from Austria–Hungary in late 1915,Masaryk and he established themselves in London and Paris, respectively, wherethey proceeded to cultivate contacts in British and French journalistic, academic,and political circles. In 1916, joined by a handful of other exiles and by repre-sentatives of Czech immigrant communities, they launched the public phase oftheir independence campaign by establishing the Czechoslovak NationalCouncil. Claiming to represent the national interests of the Czech and Slovakpeoples, the Council sought to convince the Allies that the breakup of theHabsburg empire and independence for its constituent peoples was the only suremeans of breaking the grip of Germandom and autocracy on Central Europe.Czech political culture in particular was presented as offering a secular, demo-cratic, Western-oriented alternative to the Catholicized, authoritarianinstitutions of a decrepit empire that had already effectively fallen into theclutches of militaristic Germany.36

Masaryk’s solid credentials as a pro-Western democrat earned him a sympa-thetic ear in the British, and later American, intellectual and politicalestablishments. In The New Europe, a London-based wartime weekly founded in1916 by the scholar Robert Seton-Watson and the journalist Sir Henry WickhamSteed, Masaryk found a mouthpiece for his views that published his articles regu-larly and enthusiastically espoused the cause of political independence for all theSlavic peoples of the Habsburg empire. The New Europe was read by an educatedBritish public, and its editors were extremely well connected in Whitehall.Indeed, academic contributors to the paper constituted a dominant elementamong the regional specialists appointed to the Foreign Office’s PoliticalIntelligence Department, charged with preparing recommendations regardingthe future peace settlement. There is no question that the paper functioned as apowerful instrument in shaping British policy toward the Czechoslovak NationalCouncil in 1917–1918.37 La nation tcheque, published in Paris, served a similarfunction in the French context. Masaryk was also able to earn considerablesympathy for his cause during his trip to the United States in 1917, not only bycampaigning among the Czech and Slovak immigrant communities, but also bymeeting with his fellow professor, President Woodrow Wilson.38 The exploits ofthe Czechoslovak Legion in Russia (of which more below) generated admirationand support for Masaryk’s cause among the broader Western public.

In most respects, Masaryk’s wartime platform was constructed on the intellec-tual foundations he had laid before 1914. What changed most radically duringthe war years was the status and influence of his ideas. The polarized politicalculture of total war created a ready audience for his anti-Austrian views amongWestern elites, and the collapse of Allied–Habsburg peace feelers in Spring 1918helped pave the way to Allied recognition that summer and fall of theCzechoslovak National Council and endorsement of national self-determinationfor the Czechs and Slovaks, as well as the South Slavs.39 The CzechoslovakNational Council’s remarkable diplomatic success abroad, and its use of the


Maffie connection to forge what amounted to a long-distance coalition with pro-independence forces in Bohemia, propelled its formerly marginal leaders into thepolitical cockpit in 1918. For its part, the neo-Slavic wing of Czech nationalismwas obliged to accommodate itself to the achievement of the Western, liberalnationalists. A Russophile figure on the Czechoslovak National Council wasdismissed from the organization after overplaying his hand in an internal powerstruggle,40 while in Prague, by 1918, Karel Kramář was so impressed byMasaryk’s and Beneš’ apparent influence in Allied councils that he did notdispute their claim to a leadership role in the future Czechoslovak state. In anyevent, the Bolshevik Revolution made a pro-Russian orientation impractical inthe immediate term. Thus, Masaryk and his associates were able to parlay theirposition as mavericks and political outsiders into the assumption of decisive rolesin the creation and shaping of Czechoslovakia.

While there were strong elements of continuity between Masaryk’s pre- andpost-1914 positions, the process of inventing a state in the diplomatic cyberspaceof wartime exile certainly helped shape his program and had a far-reachingimpact on the institutions and political dynamics of interwar Czechoslovakia.Masaryk’s decision openly to attack the legitimacy of the Habsburg state wasitself a function of the war. More interesting is the manner in which his wartimecircumstances shaped the future of relations between Czechs and Slovaks. Beingunencumbered by direct involvement in the political life of his homeland,Masaryk was free to take his ideas on the Czech–Slovak connection to theirlogical conclusion by advocating the creation of a Czechoslovak nation-state.

Masaryk’s effective wartime constituencies were Western elites and Czech andSlovak immigrant communities. Both groups proved receptive to his ideas onCzech–Slovak affinity. His Anglo-French–American audience was sympathetic tohis rhetoric about the need to forge a common national identity among the twoSlavic peoples on the basis of the Czechs’ liberal-democratic values, with thenew Czechoslovakia to become a bastion of the West in German-dominatedCentral Europe. For their part, the Czech and Slovak communities of the UnitedStates were much more aware of their similarities in the context of theircommon encounter with American urban life than were their brethren in the oldcountry. It was in Pittsburgh, of all places, that Masaryk met with AmericanCzech and Slovak leaders to issue a joint declaration calling for the creation ofan independent Czechoslovakia. The Pittsburgh Declaration of 1917 was aneffort to lend Masaryk’s efforts the legitimacy of popular approval by the largestcommunity of Czechs and Slovaks living outside the Austro-Hungarian empire.Yet while Masaryk regarded it as an affirmation of his vision of Czechoslovakunity, the document also contained assurances of Slovak autonomy within theframework of the future state – assurances that were to remain unfulfilled. Assuch, it was to be the subject of increasingly venomous disputes during theinterwar years.41

The problem with Masaryk’s program was that it could easily be taken aslittle more than a façade for Czech cultural imperialism. Masaryk clearlyregarded Czech culture as the ideal medium for the dissemination of progressive


values to the Slovaks. He seemed uncertain over how to deal with the fact thatSlovak was linguistically distinct from Czech. In his wartime propaganda, hereferred to Slovak as nothing more than a dialect of Czech, while promising thatthis dialect would be used in Slovak schools and administration.42 He made nomention of employing Slovak at the level of higher education, and insisted thatthe linguistic issue would not constitute a stumbling block, indeed, that “therecan be no language question, because every Slovak, even without an education,understands Czech and every Czech understands Slovak.”43 The latter observa-tion was quite true, yet it also reflected a rather naive obliviousness on Masaryk’spart to the “narcissism of minor difference” that can play so powerful a role inthe formation of national identities and in the generation of ethnic conflicts.44

Masaryk’s pre-war contacts with Slovakia’s Hlasists (see Chapter 3) and theactive leadership role that the Slovak astronomer Milan Štefánik played along-side Beneš and himself in the Czechoslovak National Council doubtlessencouraged Masaryk in his belief that political union would pave the way tocultural integration of the two peoples. But the fact was that the Hlasists consti-tuted a tiny Czechophile intellectual circle whose links to Slovak popular culturewere extremely tenuous. Štefánik himself had been educated in Prague and hadspent years abroad, becoming an officer in the French army. His personal ties toSlovakia were hardly stronger than those of Masaryk himself.45

The Czechoslovak National Council’s success at gaining diplomatic recogni-tion from the Allies in 1918, combined with the vacuum formed by the collapseof the Austro-Hungarian empire, did create a momentum that not even thegenerally cautious, conservative Slovak nationalist elite could resist – especiallygiven that this seemed to offer the most immediate chance of escape fromHungarian rule. Gathering hastily in October 1918, a self-appointed SlovakNational Council voted in favor of union with the Czechs in an independentstate.46 But there was no broad-based Slovak movement underpinning this deci-sion – nothing analogous to the popular embrace of the exiled nationalists’program by a wide spectrum of Czech social classes and political parties in 1918(as described in Chapter 4). The creation of Czechoslovakia served only to raiseSlovak expectations of self-determination that were not to be fulfilled. TheSlovaks’ sense of having been hoodwinked into an unfair bargain led to deepbitterness on their part that was to plague the politics of the interwar republic.

The Yugoslav Committee

The South Slav political leadership also experienced a bifurcation of pathsduring the war. In this case, it was the exiled Yugoslav activists whose goals wereultimately frustrated by the outcome of events in their homeland. But theirwartime political campaign was nonetheless significant in helping set the stagefor the establishment in 1918 of the kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, aswell as in promoting a vision of Yugoslavia whose failure to materialize wouldcontribute to a growing sense among Croats and Slovenes of having beencheated of their birthright.


Following the occupation of Serbia in 1915, open opposition to Austro-Hungarian policies could only be undertaken from abroad. The key figures inthis enterprise were Croat leaders from the Croat–Serb Coalition (HSK – seeChapter 3) who had begun organizing an anti-Habsburg campaign soon afterthe outbreak of hostilities. Frano Supilo had escaped Habsburg harassment bygoing into exile in Italy in 1910, and he was joined in 1914 by Ante Trumbićand a number of other activists – most notably, the internationally acclaimedCroat sculptor Ivan Meštrović – who either happened to be out of the country atthe outbreak of the war, or managed to slip out during the early weeks of theconflict. Given the polarizing atmosphere of the Austro-Serbian war and theoften brutal suppression of dissent within the Habsburg monarchy, these figureswere ready to make a complete break with Vienna. The fact that they were cutoff from regular contact with the complex dynamics of Croatian politics freedthem of the need to negotiate and compromise, and facilitated their formulationof a clear-cut separatist program. The fact that their claim to speak on behalf ofthe oppressed Croat, Slovene, and Serb masses of the southern Habsburg landswas inherently unverifiable only made it easier for these leaders of the nationalistintelligentsia to issue whatever proclamations they chose in the name of thepeople. Following contacts between these émigrés and the Serbian government,the latter lent its moral and financial support to the émigrés’ formation of theYugoslav Committee, which committed itself to the liberation of all South Slavsfrom the Habsburg yoke and their unification with the kingdom of Serbia in anindependent Yugoslav state. The Serbian government regarded this committeeas a potentially useful propaganda organization in Britain and France, whosegovernments’ attempts to lure Italy into the war by offering it the prospect ofterritorial gains along the eastern Adriatic coast conflicted with Serbia’s own waraims.47

By 1917, London had become the de facto center of operations for theYugoslav Committee. Indeed, while the leaders of the Yugoslav Committeeclaimed to represent the national will of their countrymen, their actual wartimeconstituency was limited to Croat immigrant communities in the New World, thenarrow coterie of British journalists, intellectuals, and diplomats specializing inEast Central European affairs, and beyond them, the educated Western public.The process of dialogue with men such as Robert Seton-Watson and HenryWickham Steed helped shape the way in which Supilo and Trumbić articulatedtheir own conception of a future Yugoslavia. It is very difficult to define wherethe propagandistic element of the Yugoslav activists’ rhetoric ended and theirreal views began, for the crystallization of their political platform took placewithin the context of this ongoing engagement with the educated elites ofwartime Britain. The line between propaganda and policy within the Britishgovernment was itself blurry. In March 1918, Seton-Watson and Steed weregiven the responsibility of forming the Austro-Hungarian section of theDepartment of Propaganda in Enemy Countries. They used their positionwithin the governmental apparatus to help convince Lloyd George’s cabinet toabandon the thought of a compromise peace with Austria–Hungary and to


move toward all but formal endorsement of full-fledged independence for itsconstituent peoples. Thus, propaganda could help shape diplomacy.48

The Yugoslav Committee and its supporters argued that a South Slav statewould create the best possible framework for the cultivation of a pluralistic,culturally inclusive form of nationalism that would help transform the pattern ofinter-communal rivalry and narrowly ethnic chauvinism that had dominatedBalkan politics since the late nineteenth century. Serbia would provide the mili-tary brawn needed to carve out and defend the new state, while the Croats andSlovenes would contribute their liberal-democratic values to the polity and serveas its link to the culture and commerce of the West. The cultivation of fraternalties among the constituent peoples of Yugoslavia would not come at the expenseof their individual traditions and identities: while Serbs, Slovenes, and Croatswould cultivate a common political culture (defined by the outlook of theDalmatian urban elite), the individual ethno-territorial components of the statewould enjoy autonomy and maintain some of their own distinctive institutions.Finally, Supilo and Trumbić were willing to compromise the purity of theirliberal-democratic, national self-determination doctrine by reverting to argu-ments of historic state right in their effort to justify maximal territorial claims forthe prospective state. (They were particularly concerned over Italy’s territorialclaims in Dalmatia, which were secretly recognized by the British and Frenchgovernments as the price for Italian entry into the war in 1915.) The historicalreference point for their state-right claims was the medieval Croatian kingdomfounded in the tenth century by King Zvonimir, under whose crown Dalmatiahad been united with Croatia–Slavonia.49

During the first months of the war, the beleaguered Serbian government,from its retreat in Niš, had encouraged and helped finance the formation of theYugoslav Committee and had officially endorsed the ideal of Yugoslav nationalunification. The quest for cultural expression of the fraternal ties among theSouth Slavs received official sanction and support in the form of a government-sponsored scholarly commission composed of historians, linguists, andgeographers who set about compiling “scientific” proof that Serbs, Croats, andSlovenes were indeed “tribes of one people.” Finally, in December 1914, theSerbian Parliament had issued the Niš Declaration, which defined Serbia’scentral war aim as “the liberation and unification of all our unliberated brothers:Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.”50

Yet as the war progressed, profound fissures appeared in the façade ofYugoslav solidarity. For one thing, the Yugoslav Committee’s open adoption ofthe Serbian cause as its own did not initially seem to reflect broader sentimentsamong the Croat public, although this changed as the war dragged on (seeChapter 4).

Of more immediate concern to the Yugoslav Committee was the ever moreunpredictable behavior of the Serbian government. The harrowing retreat ofthe Serbian government and army across the mountains of Albania into exile onthe Greek island of Corfu in the fall and winter of 1915 did not break the spiritof the Serbian leadership. Quite to the contrary, the Serbian authorities emerged


from the ordeal all the more determined to reap a fitting reward for the Serbianpeople’s suffering once the war ended in Allied victory. Moreover, they remainedactive in the Allied war effort by committing their troops to the new Salonika(Greece) front that was opened in the summer of 1916. The problem was thattheir conception of their anticipated reward for this dedication to the war effortsounded more like a Greater Serbia than a united Yugoslavia. While theSerbians seemed increasingly amenable to the idea of compromise with Italyover prospective territorial spoils along the Adriatic, they seemed ever less inter-ested in guaranteeing equal status to the Croat and Slovene communities in theSouth Slav lands that might come under their control. It became painfullyapparent that they were thinking in terms of annexing parts or all of Bosnia,Dalmatia, Croatia–Slavonia, Vojvodina, and Slovenia rather than achievingnational unification with the populations of these regions. The precedent ofSerbia’s inconsistent policies in Macedonia following its conquest in 1912–1913preyed ever more on the minds of the Yugoslav Committee: the inhabitants ofthis newly “liberated” province had immediately been subjected to all the obliga-tions of the Serbian citizenry, such as taxation and conscription, while attemptswere made to postpone the extension of full constitutional rights to this popula-tion. This hardly boded well for the prospects of fraternity and equality amongthe ethnic communities of a Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia.

One of the first public manifestations of the tensions between members ofthe Serbian diplomatic corps and the Yugoslav Committee came on the occasionof a London exhibit of Ivan Meštrović’s work. The Dalmatian sculptor, andmember of the Yugoslav Committee, had won international attention before thewar for his attempt to create an artistic genre expressive of Yugoslav fraternity.Meštrović’s work celebrated themes from Serbian history, focussing on images ofheroic resistance to foreign conquest and domination. He hoped to inspireCroats with the warlike traditions of their Serb brothers while showing the Serbsthat their historical identity could be expressed in a modern art form developedby a Croat. The sense of being engaged in a common cultural struggle againstAustro-Hungarian domination reached its high point in 1911 at an internationalart show in Rome. When the Habsburg authorities refused to permit a separateCroatian sub-pavilion to be set up under the auspices of the Habsburg pavilion,a number of Croatian artists – with Meštrović in the lead – staged a culturaldefection, displaying their work in the Serbian pavilion instead.51

His international reputation as an artist lent an aura of legitimacy andrespectability to the wartime Yugoslav cause in the eyes of the educated Westernpublic. An exhibition of his work in London in June 1915 drew a large publicand earned him laudatory reviews in the press.52 Seton-Watson described theexhibition as “a presentation of the Southern Slav idea in stone … ” designed“to show that the Croats and Serbs have a culture of their own, and that its bestrepresentatives regard themselves as a single people with two names.”53 Yet in anironic variation on the incident at the pre-war Rome art show, the Serbianambassador to London refused to attend the 1915 exhibition because ofMeštrović’s refusal to call himself a Serbian artist! The more moderate Serbian


ambassador to Paris crossed the Channel to appear at the exhibition in hiscolleague’s place.54

This snubbing incident was a superficial manifestation of a deep-seateddifference over the role of the Yugoslav Committee. The Serbian governmentregarded the Yugoslav Committee as a propaganda instrument pure and simple;as such, it had no business formulating an independent political agenda. Serbianefforts to reassure the Yugoslav activists only served to highlight how arroganttheir fundamental premises seemed to be. When the Corfu-based authoritiesexpressed their intention of tolerating the rights of Catholics in the futureYugoslavia, Supilo angrily insisted that toleration was not the issue: Catholicsand Orthodox needed to enjoy full and unquestioned equality of rights, and thiscould best be guaranteed by a total separation of Church from state. The officialstatus enjoyed by the Orthodox Church in the kingdom of Serbia was incompat-ible with the idea of Yugoslav unity. In a letter to Seton-Watson, Supilocomplained that the Serbians simply were not mature enough to grasp such aconcept.55

By 1916, Supilo was ready to break off relations with Serbia and to forgeahead with plans for an independent Croatian state. Yet the very multiethniccharacter of the Yugoslav Committee made it impossible to push such a decisionthrough. The Slovene members of the Committee felt that their small nationwould fare better as one of several ethnic groups in a South Slav state than as anisolated minority in an overwhelmingly Croat state. The ethnic Serbs on theCommittee were naturally loath to sever the link to Serbia. Trumbić was alsounwilling to forsake the possibility of compromise with Serbia, and Supilo even-tually resigned from the Committee in protest, dying soon afterwards.56

The internal politics of the Serbian government in exile were extremely intri-cate and turbulent, and its unhappy relationship with the Yugoslav Committeeserved as a pivotal issue around which the confrontation between the cabinet ofPrime Minister Pašić and leaders of the parliamentary opposition took place.Insofar as the Yugoslav Committee enjoyed the sympathy of certain circleswithin the British establishment, the leaders of the Serbian opposition may havehoped that their relative openness to dialogue with the Yugoslavists would earnthem London’s support in their confrontations with Pašić. Matters came to ahead in the spring and summer of 1917, following the show trial and executionof the independent-minded officers at the head of the Union or Death (“BlackHand”) organization, many of whom had had close ties to the parliamentaryopposition.57 Having used trumped-up charges of treason to eliminate this long-standing locus of resistance to the authority of his government, Pašić found hiscabinet losing ever more support in parliament. With his coalition reduced to aminority, Pašić began making renewed overtures to the Yugoslav Committee as away of neutralizing those segments of the Serbian opposition that had employedthe Yugoslav cause as a platform for their attacks on his government. This open-ness to dialogue with the Yugoslavists was also designed to align Serbia moreclosely with the rhetoric of national self-determination espoused by Russia’s newProvisional Government as well as by the United States, which had declared war


on Germany in April. Finally, in May, the South Slav political parties within theHabsburg empire had responded to overtures from the new emperor, Karl, byissuing a declaration calling for their unification within the framework of areconfigured Habsburg monarchy – a propaganda coup for the Austrians thatSerbia needed to counter.58

The Serbian government’s newly rediscovered openness to the Yugoslav idealed to the successful negotiation of the Corfu Declaration in July 1917. Thisdocument, jointly issued by the leaders of the Yugoslav Committee and theSerbian government, defined their common aim as the establishment of a demo-cratic, constitutional kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes under the Serbianruling dynasty. Critical institutional details, such as the degree of local autonomyto be granted the ethnic regions, were to be left for a popularly elected, constitu-tional assembly to iron out once the war had ended. Only the cultural andreligious rights of each constituent people were to be guaranteed.59

The convening in April 1918 of the Rome Congress of OppressedNationalities marked a high point in the Yugoslav Committee’s campaign forinternational recognition. In its eagerness to exploit the propaganda value ofhosting this two-day assembly of exiled nationalists from the Habsburg empire,the Italian government was willing to tolerate the participation of the Yugoslavsas long as they did not use the occasion to publicize their claim to territories theItalians were determined to annex. The Congress received great publicity in theWestern press and support from the Allied governments. It was marked byspeeches calling for the dismemberment of the Habsburg monarchy and itsreplacement by democratic nation-states. Potentially divisive territorial questionswere side-stepped, as stress was laid on projecting an image of solidarity amongthe subject nationalities of East Central Europe and between those nationalitiesand the Italians.

While the Corfu Agreement and the Rome Congress succeeded as propa-ganda exercises directed at Western public opinion, they had little long-termimpact on relations among the nationalist movements themselves. The CorfuAgreement had legitimized Serbia’s territorial aspirations without really commit-ting it to any specific institutional arrangements. Pašić actually used theagreement to undermine the Yugoslav Committee’s attempts to gain interna-tional recognition, arguing that the Serbian ruling dynasty could nowlegitimately claim to speak on behalf of all South Slavs. The Italian governmentdid its own part to block Allied recognition of the Yugoslav Committee, leavingTrumbić and his associates with little diplomatic or political leverage in theirdealings with Serbia.

In the endplay of October–November 1918, the Yugoslav Committee wascompletely marginalized. Serbian prime minister Pašić disarmed his owninternal opposition by inviting its leaders to join a broad coalition governmentthat would preside over the reconstruction of liberated Serbia; the oppositionleaders promptly abandoned their opportunistic advocacy of compromise withthe Yugoslav Committee as they embraced the prospect of wielding power in aSerb-dominated Yugoslavia. Most significantly of all, the Croat social and


political elites looked to the Serbian army to protect their territory against Italyand social order against the Green Cadres (see Chapter 4). The YugoslavCommittee was rendered obsolete on 1 December, as the Zagreb government’sdelegation granted essentially unconditional recognition to Serbian CrownPrince Alexander as King of the new kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.

Having fulfilled their function as propagandists for the South Slav cause, theleaders of the Yugoslav movement found themselves cast aside at the moment oftruth. It seemed that they enjoyed a much more devoted following in Britainthan in Serbia, or indeed in Croatia. The short-lived Zagreb government’seagerness to see order restored in the countryside overrode all other considera-tions, and it accepted a formula for unification with Serbia that involved thecreation of a kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in name, which wasnothing but an expanded Serbian state in practice. The Croat peasantry wasduly suppressed by the Serbian army, while Serbian administrators establishedtheir bureaucratic dominion in the towns (see Chapter 7).

Yet the historical legacy of the Yugoslav Committee cannot be dismissed asinsignificant. Its propaganda among the Western public and its cultivation ofcontact within the British establishment had paved the way for internationalrecognition of a Yugoslav state including all of Croatia and Slovenia. At one andthe same time, it was the gap between Supilo’s and Trumbić’s vision of a SouthSlav federation and the reality of a centralized, Serb-dominated Yugoslavia thatwas to serve as the central grievance of a resurgent Croat nationalism during theinterwar period.

The Polish National Committee

In the case of Poland, the divide between those nationalists who gained diplo-matic recognition in the Western capitals and those who remained in thehomeland essentially reproduced the pre-existing differences between Dmowski’sand Piłsudski’s camps (see Chapter 3). The outbreak of war put both men’s skillsto the test. An armed conflict that pitted the partitioning powers against eachother held forth great potential promise for the Polish national cause, but takingadvantage of such a volatile situation depended on diplomatic adroitness and anacute sense of political timing. The unusual circumstances of prolonged warfareevened the playing field between Piłsudski and Dmowski, for the latter’s controlof a mass organization was not of immediate benefit to him amidst the upheavalof total war. In a certain sense, the most important constituencies each of themneeded to cultivate at this point were not in Poland, but in the capitals of theGreat Powers. But which Great Powers? There lay the rub. In both Piłsudski’sand Dmowski’s cases, pre-war alignments determined their initial, wartimediplomatic orientations, but as the conflict progressed, each of them modified hisposition in light of changing circumstances. In the end, they (unintentionally)complemented each other rather well on the diplomatic front, even as their polit-ical and personal differences grew deeper. Piłsudski’s role will be examined


below, in the discussion of volunteer legions. It was Dmowski who spent most ofthe war years in the Western capitals, lobbying on behalf of the Polish cause.

The Russian commander-in-chief ’s November 1914 promise of futureautonomy for Poland did little to vindicate Dmowski’s longstanding commitmentto accommodation with Russia, especially in light of the German advance intoRussian territory in the following year. In 1915, Dmowski moved his base ofoperations to Britain. Following the March 1917 Russian Revolution, he estab-lished a Polish National Committee that lobbied the Western allies for support,and that sought to add legitimacy to the Polish cause by recruiting a volunteerforce for the Western front among Polish POWs and expatriates. Dmowski’smove to the West reflected his surmise that Britain and France might end up in astronger position than Russia to dictate peace terms to the Central Powers at theend of the war.60 He also hoped that Paris and London would help pressure theRussian government into making substantive concessions to the Poles in theevent of Russia emerging as master of Polish territory after all.

Despite his credentials as an intellectual and his familiarity with WesternEuropean societies and cultures, Dmowski was not as readily accepted by theWestern establishment as were Masaryk or the Yugoslavists. His Russophileorientation and flagrantly ethnocentric conception of nationalism raisedeyebrows in Britain; although he tried to tone down and rationalize his anti-Semitism, his open hostility toward Polish Jews and unwillingness to embrace theconcept of tolerance toward ethno-cultural minorities in an independent Polandrubbed many of his audiences the wrong way. The New Europe was critical of theNational Democrats’ avowedly intolerant approach to ethnic relations in Poland,and Dmowski was regarded with suspicion both by the general British press andby a number of key figures within the Foreign Office.61

Dmowski’s great advantage lay in the fact that Piłsudski was perceived as apro-German figure, given his willingness to collaborate for a time with theGerman and Austrian occupying forces in Poland. Dmowski made the most ofthis association, and used it to undermine the influence of Piłsudski’s informalrepresentative in London, August Zaleski.62 Dmowski also blunted the negativeimpact of his own chauvinistic style by recruiting a more palatable figure asspokesman for the Polish National Committee. Ignacy Paderewski, the world-famous pianist, minor composer, and editor of Chopin’s works, who had beenactive on behalf of Polish cultural and humanitarian causes for many years,agreed to represent the Polish National Committee in its dealings with the Alliedgovernments. Paderewski’s genteel manners, charismatic presence, andcompelling oratory were highly effective at winning sympathy for the Polishcause. Not the least of his converts was President Woodrow Wilson, whosedistaste for Dmowski was offset by his admiration for this musical virtuoso, whoso ably placed his advocacy of Polish national rights in the framework of theuniversal principles of democracy and national self-determination. AlthoughPaderewski’s nostalgia for the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, his romanticflair, and his rather sizable ego made him an unlikely partner for Dmowski, theNational Democratic leader was prepared to let him dominate the public stage


during the war as the price for legitimizing the Polish National Committee inWestern eyes. This stratagem was quite successful, for, by war’s end, even asPiłsudski seized power in Poland, the Polish National Committee had beenrecognized by the Western powers as representing Polish interests and Piłsudskiwas ultimately obliged to acquiesce in Dmowski’s and Paderewski’s leadership ofthe Polish delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.63 It remained to beseen whether the two competing streams of nationalism could be reconciledwithin the framework of an independent Polish state.

Zionism

Already established before the War as an organized movement with branches inthe major Western and Central European capitals as well as in the United Statesand a clandestine existence in the Russian empire, the World ZionistOrganization (WZO) was the ultimate exile movement, claiming as it did torepresent an entire people in exile. Its actual level of support among the Jewishdiaspora was difficult to assess. Although its international headquarters were inBerlin and its founder, Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), had been a Viennese Jew,Zionism held greater appeal among the Jews of Eastern Europe than amongtheir much more assimilated Western and Central European counterparts, whowere much more inclined to identify themselves as nationals of their host coun-tries. Yet its activities in the great Jewish population centers of the Russian Paleof Settlement and Russian Poland were limited by the tsarist government’s polit-ical repression. It also encountered competition in East European urban centersfrom rival Jewish political movements such as the Marxist Bund and met withsuspicion and opposition on the part of the traditional, orthodox communitiesthat dominated Jewish small-town (shtetl) life. Indeed, most orthodox rabbisregarded exile as a divinely ordained condition from which only the Messiah –not a self-appointed, predominantly secular, political organization – wouldredeem the Jewish people.64

During the years since its formal founding at the Basel Congress of 1897, theZionist movement had undergone a significant internal upheaval over its choiceof tactics and the nature of its fundamental objectives. The so-called politicalZionism of Herzl and his circle had focussed on the use of personal diplomacyto win an internationally endorsed charter for the settlement of European Jewryas an autonomous society in Palestine. As repeated efforts to win clear-cutsupport for this project from European governments and to overcome the suspi-cions of the Ottoman government came to naught, leading members of themovement, Herzl among them, turned to the possibility of an alternative territo-rial option – possibly in British East Africa – for the future Jewish state. Theuproar this provoked and the reaffirmation of the unbreakable tie between theJewish people and the Land of Israel by the Sixth Zionist Congress of 1903marked not only the defeat of territorialism but a decisive power shift within themovement away from political Zionism and toward the advocates of “practicalZionism.” This group favored an incremental approach focussed on developing


the existing Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine by circumventing therestrictions of the hostile but bribable Ottoman authorities, and encouraging thegrowth of a distinctively Jewish, Hebraic national culture in the nascent yishuv(the Zionist community in Palestine). This strategy, it was argued, would fosterthe gradual development of the social, economic, and cultural infrastructure ofa core national community in the ancestral homeland, creating facts on theground rather than waiting interminably for the diplomatic version of messianicdeliverance.

This approach was more than just an alternative means to a common end. Itsadvocates, who were mostly middle-class Jewish intellectuals from the Russianempire, shared a common opposition to what they saw as the condescension,moral vacuity, and cultural sterility of political Zionism. The political Zionists’seemingly futile diplomacy was conducted on behalf of the Jewish masses, butwithout their involvement. Completely focussed on the Holy Grail of a Jewishstate, to be organized according to liberal, rationalist, technocratic ideals, theyseemed disinterested in the question of what would make the new Jewish societydistinctively and authentically Jewish. Theirs could be seen as a culturally assimi-lationist form of Central European Zionism; indeed, it was their assumption thatGerman would be the lingua franca and language of high culture in the newsociety.

By contrast, the practical Zionists, among whom a core group known as thecultural Zionists were particularly influential, saw the cultivation of agriculturalsettlements in Palestine as laying the foundation for an egalitarian societyconnected directly to the ancestral land through the medium of labor. Thequality of the Zionist project in Palestine was, to their mind, much more impor-tant than the quantity of Jews that could be transported there. Influenced by thementality of the radical Russian intelligentsia, with its deeply ingrained hostilitytoward the institutions of state power, cultural Zionists such as the RussianJewish essayist Ahad Ha‘am (Asher Ginzberg, 1856–1927) stressed that a Jewishcommonwealth in Palestine would never be able to accommodate the millions ofdestitute and persecuted East European Jews and thus could not offer the mate-rial solution to the Jewish problem that the political Zionists claimed it could. Itsrole should rather be that of a cultural and emotional center for world Jewry,where a modern national culture organically rooted in Jewish history and tradi-tion and using Hebrew as its living tongue could be developed free of theovershadowing and assimilationist influence of non-Jewish forms of modernity.The influence of this core community would radiate outward into the diasporaand serve as the inspiration and model for the revitalization of Jewish life inEurope and around the world.65

The triumph of practical Zionism within the WZO did not bring aboutinstantaneous success for the movement. The development of the yishuv seemedto grind to a halt during the last years before the war, its population leveling offat 35,000 (in addition to the 50,000 Jews from Palestine’s pre-Zionist Jewishcommunity) in the face of grievous economic problems and of a Young Turkregime even more hostile than its predecessor toward the settlement of foreign


nationals on its territory.66 Moreover, the elitist aspects of practical Zionism, withits emphasis on the role of a pioneering vanguard in creating a model society inthe Land of Israel and on the revival of Hebrew to the exclusion of Yiddish –the everyday tongue of the East European Jewish masses – served to limit themass appeal of the movement, whose leadership seemed unable to move beyondvehement theoretical debates toward creating the facts on the ground aboutwhich they held forth so eloquently.

It was amidst this atmosphere of stagnation and lack of direction in theZionist movement that the First World War broke out. The initial response at thetop levels of the organization was to adopt a cautious wait-and-see attitude and,as a movement with branches and constituencies in each of the major belligerentcountries, to maintain a policy of strict neutrality toward the conflict. Berlin wasto remain the location of WZO executive headquarters, with neutralCopenhagen serving as the site for an international liaison office and for periodicconferences bringing together leaders of the country branches.

Needless to say, maintaining liaison in wartime proved to be an awkward andhaphazard affair. In practice, the branch offices functioned independently of oneanother, their perspectives and policy orientations shaped increasingly by localpolitical constraints and opportunities. Close identification with their respectivecountries’ causes also eroded the official stance of neutrality, particularly inGermany and Britain. Rather than compromising the prospects of the move-ment, this lack of coordination and breakdown of neutrality actually worked toits long-term advantage, as German and British Zionist leaders were able to winunprecedented and critical support from their respective governments in thecontext of wartime national and imperial rivalries. The particularly notablesuccess of the British-based Zionists led by Chaim Weizmann (1874–1952) increating a de facto alliance with the world’s greatest imperial power propelledWeizmann and his supporters to the postwar leadership of the WZO and, moreimportantly, created a new synthesis of political and practical Zionism in thecontext of a suddenly revitalized yishuv.

The attempt by German Zionists to influence German policy toward the Jewsof occupied Poland and Lithuania, as described earlier in this chapter, waslargely unsuccessful, although the Zionist movement in the occupied zones bene-fited indirectly from the opportunities created by German occupation. GermanZionist lobbying on behalf of the small yishuv in Ottoman-controlled Palestine,by contrast, did bear fruit. Concerned that Jemal Pasha’s expulsion of the Jewsof Jaffa in April 1917 was the prelude to a complete dismantling of the yishuv,German Zionists prevailed upon the Kaiser’s government to intervene. TheGerman government feared that the destruction of the yishuv by Germany’sOttoman ally would antagonize Jewish opinion in Russia (which Germany hopedshortly to knock out of the war) as well as public opinion in America and inneutral countries and serve to undermine the image and negotiating position ofthe Central Powers at the prospective peace conference. Intervention by Germandiplomats in Istanbul and by General von Falkenhayn in Palestine did in facthelp restrain Jemal Pasha from massive retaliation against the yishuv following the


arrest in October 1917 of a ring of Jewish spies that had been reporting toBritish intelligence. German support thus proved crucial in saving the badlybattered yishuv as a core community around which the Zionist project coulddevelop in the aftermath of the war.67

The fear – never realized – that German interest in Zionism might eventuallyblossom into a far-reaching expression of support for the Jewish national causehelped spur dramatic developments in British policy. Critical to this turn ofevents was the personal initiative of Chaim Weizmann and a small coterie ofassociates. A relatively obscure figure until the war presented him with a goldenopportunity to enter the political stage, Weizmann was a native of the RussianPale of Settlement who had studied chemistry in Germany and Switzerland andassumed a faculty position at the University of Manchester in 1904, all the whileremaining actively involved in the Zionist movement. His wartime appointmentto the Ministry of Munitions, where he made decisive contributions to the devel-opment of a new technique for the production of acetone (an importantingredient in the manufacture of cordite, an artillery-shell propellant), helpedhim forge useful political connections and gain personal renown in governmentcircles. His enthusiastic Anglophilia and adeptness in the cultivation of a genteelmanner, combined with his unabashed self-identification as a Russian Jew, wasideally suited to appeal to the British upper crust’s fascination with the exoticforeigner.68

A cultural Zionist and disciple of Ahad Ha‘am, Weizmann nonetheless saw inBritain’s war against the Ottoman empire the perfect opportunity for forging alasting political alliance between Zionism and a Great Power that, he wasconvinced, would have a decisive role to play in shaping the peace settlementand in allocating the spoils of war in the Middle East. His central objective wasto gain British endorsement of the Jewish right to national self-determination inPalestine. Essentially, as David Vital has argued, this represented a reversion tothe political Zionists’ obsession with the idea of a charter. But whereas Herzl andhis followers had failed to secure the support of any power, Weizmann wascorrect in perceiving a unique opportunity to do just that in wartime Britain.

A variety of concerns and interests converged to create a receptive audiencein Whitehall. Linking British imperial interest in Palestine (which was seen as apotential protective buffer for British-controlled Egypt) to the Zionist campaignfor a Jewish national home would give Whitehall a bargaining chip in any poten-tial peace talks with Germany and might help preempt any similar moves by theGerman government. In the aftermath of the 1916 Sykes–Picot agreement inwhich British and French diplomats agreed on the partition of the Middle Eastinto spheres of influence, British statesmen began to second-guess the section ofthe agreement providing for international control of Palestine. Once again,sponsoring the Jewish national cause could serve as a lever with which to nudgethe French out and assume undivided control of Palestine. British concern,following the March 1917 Revolution, over Russia’s continued commitment tothe war effort also reinforced interest in Zionism. Because many prominentfigures in Russian socialist parties were Jewish, British diplomats labored under


the misapprehension – encouraged by Weizmann – that a dramatic pro-Zionistgesture could secure their support for the common war effort. Finally, variouspersonal preconceptions and prejudices combined to awaken pro-Zionist sympa-thies among some key actors in the British establishment, such as Mark Sykes, ananti-Semite who regarded the Zionist program as an attractive alternative bothto the machinations of “international Jewish finance” and to “Godless Jewishsocialism” – and who also saw its sponsorship by Britain as an opportune escaperoute from the Palestine provisions of the Sykes–Picot agreement that bore hisname.69 The upshot, following the commencement of General Allenby’s inva-sion of Palestine, was Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour’s November 1917declaration that:

His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestineof a national home for the Jewish people, and will use its best endeavours tofacilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood thatnothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights ofexisting non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and politicalstatus enjoyed by Jews in any other country.70

There were elements of ambiguity to the wording of this text, which did notdefine what a national home was, and neither specified whether the nationalhome was to be coextensive with Palestine’s borders nor defined where thoseborders might lie. But although the Declaration fell short of maximal Zionistpolitical desiderata, the decision to issue it marked a watershed event that led tothe postwar establishment of a British-held League of Nations mandate as aninternationally recognized framework for Jewish emigration to Palestine and thedevelopment there of the institutional foundation of Jewish self-government.

Weizmann’s diplomatic success helped generate the sort of mass Jewishsupport for his policy that he had claimed to enjoy in the first place. In otherwords, his claim to represent mass opinion among East European Jewry had aself-fulfilling quality. Given the inaccessibility of the Jews of German-occupiedEastern Europe and the remoteness and chaotic conditions of Russian Jewry,there was no way definitively to ascertain Jewish popular sentiments in the midstof the war. Jewish opinion abroad could be whatever a convincing, if self-appointed, spokesman in London said it was.71 In fact, Russian Zionist leadersrefused officially to abandon Zionist neutrality in favor of Weizmann’s openlypro-British stance, but his failure to sway them did not significantly detract fromhis argument that a bold initiative by Britain would win international Jewishsupport. Indeed, there was a large measure of truth to this line of argument –with the notable exception that Jewish opinion did not have the kind of influenceon Russian revolutionary politics that His Majesty’s Government thought itdid.72

Weizmann also had to overcome the opposition of the British Jewish estab-lishment, whose representatives sat on the Conjoint Foreign Committee ofBritish Jews. Convinced that claiming Palestine on the basis of Jewish national


identity would compromise the Jewish claim to civil equality within their hostcountries, the assimilationist leaders who dominated the Conjoint Committeetook the unusual step of attacking Weizmann’s policy in the mainstream Britishpress. This only redounded to Weizmann’s benefit, as none other than Sir HenryWickham Steed, editor of The Times, friend of oppressed nationalities, andbeliever in the anti-Semitic notion of an international Jewish conspiracy (andhence, perhaps, in the power of world Jewry to help Britain’s cause?), weighed inon behalf of the Zionists. The open attack on Zionism also backfired within theBritish Jewish community, and led to a vote of censure against the ConjointCommittee by one of its constituent elements, the Board of Deputies of BritishJews.73

Once again, then, a self-selected coterie of committed activists had success-fully employed their connections to the British academic, journalistic, andpolitical establishments and their familiarity with, and genuine commitment to,liberal political rhetoric and values, to propel themselves into the role of repre-sentatives of their nation and to gain the qualified endorsement of a great powerfor their nationalist objectives. Weizmann’s political triumph was the triumph ofa liberal nationalism over the liberal assimilationism of the West EuropeanJewish establishments as well as over the cautious incrementalism and neutralismof the pre-war Zionist establishment. It marked the synthesis of politicalZionism with practical Zionism – a synthesis whose specifically Anglophile andideologically moderate orientation would be called into question by the socialistZionist leaders of the growing yishuv during the 1930s – but whose main outlinesreappeared in the form of David Ben-Gurion’s social-democratic étatisme andIsrael’s subsequent alliance with the United States in the second half of thetwentieth century.

Although Zionism was but one of many ideological currents amongEuropean Jewry during and after the Great War, its claim to representative statuswas in some senses less problematic than that of the East European nationalcommittees described above, since it could not and did not set out to impose itsvision on diaspora Jewry. Its constituency was a self-selected one, consisting ofthose Jews who chose to emigrate to Palestine or to support the effort. But withinPalestine itself, of course, the democratic principles embraced by Zionists raninto a tougher dilemma, and one which had not been systematically examined inadvance – the presence of some 600,000 Arabs whose collective identity or inter-ests could hardly be reconciled with the Jewish aspiration to nationalself-determination.

Synopsis

In each of the above cases, a small group of activists based in Allied capitalsforged a program for national independence that gained significant publicacceptance and official recognition in the West. Removed as they were from thepolitical constraints of their native lands, they were free to promote agendas thatanticipated the defeat of Germany and called for the dismantling of the


Habsburg or Ottoman empires. Their locations in London and Paris enhancedthe liberal-democratic tenor of their rhetoric. This was partly a function of self-selection: those who were predisposed to favor the political values of the West(the Czechoslovak activists, the Yugoslavists) or who had strong cultural andpersonal connections to the West (Masaryk, Štefánik, Paderewski, Meštrović,Weizmann) were most likely to turn to Britain, France, and the United States forsupport. Their liberal-democratic inclinations were also reinforced by their roleas propagandists addressing a Western audience during a war that was, by 1917,portrayed in the Allied and Associated countries as a struggle between democ-racy and autocracy. In Dmowski’s case, the use of such verbiage was a calculatedploy, but, among the other figures dealt with here, ideological inclination andpolitical necessity reinforced each other. At the same time, however, theirprograms were filled with the oversimplifications and facile solutions that are thehallmarks of propaganda. The notion of historic state right was conflated withliberal self-determination doctrine in an attempt to justify maximal territorialclaims. Endorsement by leaders of immigrant communities was held up as avalid source of legitimacy for interethnic (especially Czechoslovak) federationschemes that did not necessarily have strong potential for broad-based support inthe homelands. And yet, precisely because they enjoyed Allied support, thesenational committees and their political programs had a substantive impact onthe postwar course of events in their countries, either by being catapulteddirectly into a position of power (as in the case of the Czechoslovak NationalCouncil becoming the Provisional Government of Czechoslovakia, the PolishNational Committee becoming the Polish delegation to the Paris PeaceConference, or the Zionist Organization establishing the framework for Jewishemigration to, and self-rule in, Palestine) or – in the case of the YugoslavCommittee – by representing a counterfactual scenario, the non-realization ofwhich would form a basis for challenges to the legitimacy of the postwarsuccessor state.

Volunteer Legions

A closely related category of wartime nationalist activism was that of the volun-teer legions. The legions were variously based on both Central Power- andAllied-controlled territory; their contributions to their host countries’ war effortswere intended to win support for the self-determination of the nations whoseaspirations they claimed to represent. As in the case of the national committeesdescribed above, with which many of them were affiliated, a number of thesemilitary formations gained a significance far out of proportion to the numbers ofmen enlisted in their ranks. Their impact could take a variety of forms. In somecases, their wartime exploits provided a kernel of truth around which nationalistmyths were woven by the postwar successor states. In a number of instances,veterans of legions went on personally to play powerful roles as self-made nation-alist elites that laid claim to political hegemony in the successor states.

Prisoners of war constituted a major recruitment pool for volunteer legions


on both sides of the conflict. In the Central Powers, émigré organizations such asthe Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (SVU), mentioned above, lobbiedsuccessfully for the establishment of separate camps for their co-ethnics amongPOWs from the Russian army. Such facilities were established inAustria–Hungary and Germany for Ukrainian, Polish, Finnish, Georgian, andMuslim POWs. Transfer to these camps was voluntary, although it had potentialrewards in the form of more lenient treatment; in the case of Ukrainian pris-oners, approximately 80,000 chose the option of being housed in camps set asidefor them in Germany and Austria–Hungary. This act of self-differentiation andthe subsequent experience of living in an ethnically homogeneous camp doubt-less enhanced whatever pre-existing sense of national identity these soldiers mayhave had. It was from ethnic POW camps, in turn, that many men were drawninto volunteer legions such as the Finnish Jäger Battalion and Georgian Legionorganized by the German army in 1915 and 1916, respectively. Ukrainian volun-teers were trained and transported to the Ukrainian sector of the front, but werenever actually allowed to participate in the fighting for fear that they might turnagainst their Central Power patrons.74

Habsburg POWs in Russia constituted a major recruitment pool for volunteerlegions affiliated with the Allied powers. One of the less prominent examples wasthe Serbian Volunteer Corps, whose brief and unhappy history of dissensionbetween Serb officers and other South Slav recruits seemed to highlight thetremendous potential for divisions among South Slavs rather than to embody theidea of Yugoslav unity.75 By contrast, the Czechoslovak Legion stands out as anexample of a volunteer force that carved out a prominent role for itself in thefoundation myth of the Czechoslovak state.

The Czechoslovak Legion

From the beginning of their political activity in the West, Masaryk, Beneš, andŠtefánik lobbied hard for the formation of separate contingents of Czech volun-teers in the French and Italian armies. France was the first country to respondpositively, and the Italians gradually followed suit. These Czech legions wererecruited from among Habsburg POWs in Italy and from Czech and Slovakémigré communities in the United States and other countries overseas. TheCzech contingent in the Russian Army, known as the Družina, was linked to apan-Slavic and pro-tsarist umbrella organization formed in September 1914 byrepresentatives of Czech communities from the major Russian urban centers,calling itself the Association of Czechoslovak Societies in Russia.76

In the spring of 1917, following the overthrow of the tsarist government,Masaryk was able to gain the Russian Provisional Government’s recognition ofhis authority over the Association of Czechoslovak Societies in Russia,displacing the influence of pan-Slavs in the organization. The Družina was nowintegrated into an autonomous Czechoslovak Legion answerable to theauthority of Masaryk’s National Committee, and an active recruitment


campaign was initiated among Czech and Slovak prisoners of war. Finally, it wasagreed that the expanded Czechoslovak force would be free to leave Russia (byway of the Trans-Siberian railroad and the Far Eastern port of Vladivostok) forthe Western Front as soon as possible.77 Some 10 per cent of Czech prisonersvolunteered for the Legion. Czechs of middle-class, educated backgrounds weredisproportionately represented in the expanded force, but most of the Legion’srank-and-file were of lower-class background, and there were some Slovaks intheir number as well.

By the time the Legion was prepared to set forth, the Bolsheviks were inpower and had signed the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty. As all semblance of publicorder broke down in the country, POWs of all nationalities found themselvesincreasingly free of formal camp discipline, but mostly unable to find a way ofreturning home immediately. Many of them either joined one of the broad arrayof rival Russian militias that were competing for followers as they braced for civilwar, or formed their own political committees and military units (often in affilia-tion with Russian ideological groups, ranging from monarchist to Bolshevik).

Under these conditions, it is not surprising that the initial Bolshevik commit-ment to upholding the previous government’s understanding with theCzechoslovak Legion quickly gave way to mutual suspicion: the Bolsheviksfeared that the Legion would make common cause with their enemies, while theCzech fighters were suspicious of Bolshevik attempts to disarm them. Persistentefforts by pro-Bolshevik (“Internationalist”) former POWs – many of themMagyars and Germans, though also including Czechs – to win the rank-and-fileof the Legion over to their cause led to violent incidents and heightenedtensions.78 In the wake of an armed clash at Chelyabinsk in May 1918, theunderstanding with the Bolsheviks broke down completely. The officers of theCzechoslovak Legion met in council and decided to fight their way toVladivostok in the face of Bolshevik opposition. As they traveled in theirarmored rail cars, the highly motivated Czechs seized one town after anotherfrom local Bolshevik authorities. In so doing, they became de facto participants inthe Russian Civil War, allying themselves with Socialist Revolutionaries,Mensheviks, and other, mostly left-wing, Russian elements opposed to theBolsheviks. The activities of the Legion attracted great attention in the West,where the Czechs were seen first as the potential kernel for a reconstitutedEastern Front against Germany and later also as a core element in the Westernmilitary intervention against the Bolsheviks. In the end, these Anglo-Frenchpipedreams came to naught, but the Czechoslovak Legion emerged with itshonor and reputation intact in the eyes of the victorious powers.79

Ships to evacuate most of the Czech and Slovak fighters from Vladivostok didnot become available until 1920, long after the guns had fallen silent on theWestern Front.80 But the epic journey across Siberia had already assumed apolitical and propagandist significance far out of proportion to any materialcontribution it could have made to the Allied war effort. The Legion’s demon-stration of self-sacrifice and heroism on behalf of the anti-German cause wassuccessfully played upon by the exiled Czech leaders in their struggle to gain


Western recognition of their country’s independence and of their territorialdemands. Beyond that, it rapidly acquired the status of national myth within thenewly founded state.

The transformation of the Legion’s experiences into a national-cultural arte-fact began during the actual course of its trek across Siberia. Using money andequipment provided by Czech émigré associations, the legionaries recorded theirprogress toward Vladivostok in photos and moving pictures, produced newspa-pers and other publications on board one of their train cars, entertainedthemselves with theatrical productions, and designed monuments in honor oftheir martyred comrades. Much of this imagery and material was subsequentlyincorporated in the propagation of the Legion’s story in interwarCzechoslovakia.81 The nationalist version of history that arose from this down-played or ignored the relative quiescence down to 1917 of the majority of theCzech populace and leadership, while portraying the exceptional experience ofthe legionaries as emblematic of the determination and solidarity that hadanimated every true son and daughter of the nation during the Great War.82

Piłsudski’s First Brigade

A distinctive variation on this theme was developed by Piłsudski’s First Brigade –the most renowned of the Polish military formations that came into being underthe protection of the Central Powers.

Among the various Polish armed formations created on one part or anotherof that partitioned country’s territory during the war, the ones that maintainedthe most continuous corporate identity and most steadfast commitment to ameasure of autonomy were those under Piłsudski’s command. Piłsudski initiallyenjoyed a luxury unmatched by that of his Czech or South Slav counterparts –the support and encouragement of the Austrian government. Given that theprimary focus of his activity was directed at the undermining of tsarist authorityin Russian-ruled Poland, the Austrian authorities had allowed him to use Galiciaas a base for the organization of an underground, nationalist militia fronting as asharpshooting club. Most of the volunteers for this force were students of anurban, middle-class background, people with a strong sense of history whoseimaginations were fired by the association of their formation with the traditionof Da̧browski’s legions that had fought alongside Napoleon a century earlier.83

Austrian sponsorship soon proved to have its liabilities. At the outbreak of theFirst World War, Piłsudski’s force conducted a brief, unsuccessful incursion intoRussian Poland, but soon thereafter found itself obliged – under threat of disso-lution by the Austrian authorities – to merge into a broader formation known asthe Polish Legions, which came under the nominal oversight of a tenuous coali-tion of rival Galician–Polish political parties. In the eyes of Austrian militaryintelligence, the Legions were to serve as an instrument for promoting and legit-imizing the extension of Habsburg rule over Russian Poland.84

Piłsudski was given the command of only one brigade (the First Brigade) inthe Polish Legions, and his challenge was to maintain a distinctive role for this


force that would compensate for its small size and that would counteractAustrian attempts to dilute the distinctive identity of the Legions. He met thischallenge by investing his 5,000 men with an egalitarian ethos and an esprit decorps that enhanced their discipline and battlefield performance. Members of theforce addressed each other as “citizen” as well as by military rank and there wereno gradations of pay among officers. By the same token, the Brigade did notpresent itself as a narrowly ideological grouping; Piłsudski broke off his formalties to the Polish Socialist Party and made it clear that acceptance into hisbrigade was contingent on personal commitment to the cause of national libera-tion rather than party affiliation. The educated background of most of itsmembers, their high degree of political motivation, and the democratic-revolu-tionary atmosphere that suffused the First Brigade contributed to its outstandingperformance in combat during the bloody campaigns of 1915–1916.85

As Russian Poland fell under an increasingly exploitative and arbitraryGerman and Austrian military occupation, Piłsudski’s political orientationshifted away from cooperation with Vienna and Berlin and toward resistance.His alliance with Austria had always been tactical in nature, and as the CentralPowers consolidated their grip on Poland, he took measures to distance himselfand his men from any hint of collaboration. From 1915 on, he began directingnew volunteers away from the First Brigade and into the Polish MilitaryOrganization (the “POW” according to its Polish initials) – a clandestine forcethat he had secretly created in skeletal form months before the outbreak of war,and which remained outside the purview of the Austrian authorities.

The German and Austrian military authorities’ decision to bring all Polishlegions under their direct command provoked Piłsudski into ordering the 20,000men of the POW to undertake sabotage operations against the German andAustrian occupation forces. At the time of his resignation from the ProvisionalState Council two months later (July 1917), Piłsudski tried to organize the massdefection of his men to Russia, where the new Provisional Government hadexpressed its qualified support for an independent Poland. Although these planswere disrupted by his arrest and confinement at Magdeburg fortress, near Berlin,Piłsudski’s reputation for political virtue and military prowess was such by nowthat his captivity only enhanced his image as a leader whose role transcended thepetty squabbles of party politics. As the end of the war approached in November1918, the Germans released Piłsudski from prison and transported him toWarsaw, where the German-appointed Regency Council handed over power tohim.86

Sundry other militias and armies were formed in the various parts of Polandduring these years. In their multiplicity of affiliations and objectives, theseformations reflected the fragmented nature of Polish politics rather thanembodying a sense of national unity. At the beginning of the war, Piłsudski’smain political rival, Roman Dmowski, created the Pulawski Legion that foughtas part of the Russian army.87 When the Russian Provisional Government recog-nized Poland’s right to independence in 1917, it suited action to words byseparating some half-million Polish soldiers from the regular armed forces and


organizing them into separate formations. As the Russian army disintegrated,some of these units ended up joining the Red Army, while others fought theBolsheviks. One formation was cut to pieces by armed Ukrainian peasants inJune 1918, as it fought to protect the estates of the Polish landed gentry againstsocial revolution.88

Only in February 1918, when the Germans and Austro-Hungarians signed apeace treaty with Ukraine that promised the cession of Polish territory to thenew Ukrainian state, did broad segments of Polish society begin to coalescearound a position of opposition to the Central Powers’ policy, vindicatingPiłsudski’s earlier break with the occupation authorities.89 The Polish RegencyCouncil issued a protest against the Ukrainian treaty, members of the PolishCircle in the Austrian Reichsrat were harshly critical, demonstrations broke outin Galician cities, and the Austrian-backed Legions attempted to escape toRussia. The one brigade that actually succeeded in crossing the lines wascommanded by General Józef Haller, who subsequently left for France, where heassumed the command of an army of 100,000 Poles (former POWs and recruitsfrom émigré communities) fighting on the Western Front.90

The number of men involved in Piłsudski’s operations was minute comparedto the hundreds of thousands of Poles who served as conscripts in the armies ofthe Great Powers (especially in the Russian army), and in the various other Polishparty militias and volunteer corps. But it is precisely in the face of this bewil-dering and seemingly incoherent historical record that Piłsudski’s contributionacquired its significance. Before the war was over, he was already looked to as apotential leader by units beyond his immediate control, including the Polishforces created under the auspices of the Russian Provisional Government.91

When an independent Poland emerged, battered and dazed, from the wreckageof three empires, Piłsudski towered above the political scene as a figure whosesupporters felt he had never compromised his principles, never collaborated withoccupying powers beyond the clear limits of the national interest, and had ledone of the most cohesive and militarily successful Polish armed formations. Theexperience of his brigade constituted a meaningful story line that could serve asthe backbone of a unifying nationalist myth. In its official histories, school text-books, and public rituals, the interwar Polish republic was to portray the exploitsof the First Brigade as a microcosm of the national experience and as emblem-atic of the whole people’s single-minded struggle for national liberation.92 Aquarter of a century later, de Gaulle’s Free French forces were to play a looselyanalogous role in the reconstruction of a positive French national self-image.

As with the Free French, this myth was a form of overcompensation for thereality of a society whose response to the war had highlighted its deep internaldivisions. In fact, the ethos of the First Brigade had a double-edged quality:Piłsudski’s legionnaires worshipped the idea of the nation as a supreme value forwhich they were eager to lay down their own lives; by the same token, they cameto see themselves as a natural elite whose own conduct had embodied nationalistideals that the nation as a whole had failed to live up to. This self-image as an


unappreciated vanguard of the nation crystallized in the first weeks of the war,in the wake of the First Brigade’s initial foray from Galicia into Russian Poland.This incursion had been undertaken in the hope of stimulating a generaluprising against the tsarist oppressors. The legionnaires’ dismay over the popularapathy that greeted them was channeled into the cultivation of a bitter pride inthe loneliness of their noble mission. As the last words of the Brigade’s anthemput it:

We no longer need recognition from you,Neither your words, nor your tears,The days of seeking your compassion are ended,To hell with you!93

According to Andrzej Garlicki, Piłsudski actively fostered this sense of cama-raderie-in-alienation, encouraging his followers to value collective self-reliance,group discipline, and obedience to their leader as the most important principlesshaping their mental outlook and governing their behavior.94 In the postwaryears, this mentality was to manifest itself in a self-serving form of politicalelitism that contributed to the erosion of democratic principles in the Polishrepublic.

The Arab Revolt

In the very difficult cultural and geopolitical circumstances of the Arab world, astriking analogy to the case of Piłsudski’s legionnaires is to be found in the mili-tary and political trajectory of the leaders of the Arab Revolt.

The term Arab Revolt – as the events described below came to be known inthe Arab world – is itself somewhat misleading, suggesting as it does a generaluprising of the Arab masses against their Turkish overlords. This was in fact amuch more limited revolt against the Ottoman state by Hussein, Sharif andEmir of Mecca and ruler of the Hejaz (the province running along the westerncoast of the Arabian peninsula and containing the Islamic holy cities of Meccaand Medina). The original motives of Hussein cannot be said to have beennationalist in nature. As the local potentate of a province on the periphery of theOttoman empire, Hussein began to clash with Istanbul in the last years beforethe war as he attempted to preserve the functional autonomy of the Hejaz in theface of a centralizing Young Turk administration that was encroaching upon it.Hussein had been appointed Sharif of Mecca in 1908 by the Ottoman Sultanagainst the wishes of the CUP, creating tension between the Young Turks andthe Sharif from the start. Moreover, the completion of a railway line south toMedina in the year of Hussein’s appointment had facilitated the imposition ofmuch more direct Ottoman administrative control over the city and surroundingprovince; the prospect of a further extension of the line to Mecca arousedHussein’s concern. An additional source of strain came with the onset of thewar, as revenue from the Muslim pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca was drasticallyreduced by the British naval blockade. By the same token, the war increased the


likelihood that the British, based in Egypt, would respond favorably to Hussein’sovertures, as in fact they did. The correspondence in 1915–1916 betweenHussein and Sir Henry McMahon (British High Commissioner in Egypt) led toBritish military support for Hussein’s revolt against Ottoman rule, which beganin June 1916.95

The population of the Hejaz cannot be said to have been nationallyconscious either. Most of the population was nomadic and the first local newspa-pers had not appeared until after 1908. Apart from some members of the rulingfamily itself (for which Hussein adopted the name “Hashemites” at the begin-ning of his revolt in 1916), the province was in many ways removed from thepolitical and cultural pulse of the great population centers of the Arab world.96

The rank-and-file of the Hashemites’ armies was composed of Bedouintribesmen whose personal loyalty was to their sheikhs, and whose sheikhs in turnhad to be cajoled, threatened, and bribed into line by Hussein and his sons wholed the military forces.

Once he had decided to risk open confrontation, Hussein’s ambitions didextend beyond the confines of the Hejaz. Yet, here too, his operative mentalframework was not strictly nationalist. In his Arabic-language propaganda, heattacked the Young Turk regime as at heart secular and un-Islamic, suggestingthat he would restore true Islamic rule to the lands that fell under his sway.97

And yet, the revolt of the Hejaz did take on the political mantle of Arabnationalism by virtue of the triangular linkage that connected it with the secretnationalist societies of Syria and Iraq (Mesopotamia) and with the British.During two trips to Damascus in 1915–1916, Hussein’s son Faisal had estab-lished contact and explored the possibility of cooperation with leaders ofal-Fatat and al-‘Ahd, and was inducted as a member of the latter society. Faisalwent on to become commander of the Northern Army, the most important mili-tary arm of the Hejazi revolt, which was to enter Syria alongside the army ofBritain’s General Allenby in 1918. The British government itself looked uponthe Sharif ’s rebellion as a spark that might ignite the flames of Arab nationalismin the population centers of Syria and Iraq. This view was encouraged by Arabdefectors from the Ottoman forces and political exiles who belonged to al-‘Ahdand al-Fatat and made wildly exaggerated claims to British officials in Cairoabout the membership figures and extent of support for the societies amongArab officers serving in the Ottoman armed forces. The Hussein–McMahoncorrespondence was partly shaped by these considerations, and resulted in aBritish undertaking to support Hussein in the establishment of Arab indepen-dence across much of present-day Jordan, Syria, and Iraq.98

Hussein’s alliance with Britain was thus framed in terms of the Arabs’ right tonational self-determination99 and the revolt was directly tied to Arab nationalismthrough the person of Faisal. Rhetorically and symbolically, the revolt of theHejaz took on the aura of an Arab Revolt, even though the promised uprising inSyria failed to materialize (see Chapter 4).

Not only was the symbolic significance of the Revolt to grow in the aftermathof the war, as its myth was cultivated by the Arab regimes that traced their


origins to it. It also had a concrete, functional impact on postwar nationalist poli-tics, particularly in the case of Iraq. For the Revolt served as a framework for theformation of a self-selected nationalist elite, loosely analogous in its experienceand self-image to the cohort of Polish legionnaires who rose to positions ofpower in interwar Poland.

The central figures in this case were a small group of Arab defectors from theOttoman army. Out of the hundreds of thousands of Arab soldiers whodeserted on a variety of fronts during the course of the war, the overwhelmingmajority simply tried to make their way back to their homes rather than rally toa new military-political cause. But a few hundred officers from Syria and Iraqcrossed over from Ottoman positions to Allied lines along a variety of fronts,eventually making their way to the Hejaz to join the military campaign led bySharif Hussein and his sons. Other recruits were drawn into the Revolt fromamong the ranks of Iraqi prisoners held in British camps in India and Egypt.100

Numerically, these Syrian and Iraqi contingents were a drop in the bucket,given that the Hejazi forces numbered some 40,000 men (including 30,000 irreg-ulars).101 Their numbers were also very small in relation to those Syrians andIraqis who remained loyal to the Sultan to the end of the war. Moreover, onlyaround seventy were members of al-‘Ahd and al-Fatat. But they formed verydistinct, tightly knit groups of experienced, Ottoman-trained officers, whoassumed dominant roles in the command structure of the Hejazi forces. Thosewho were members of al-‘Ahd and al-Fatat had already been actively engaged inthe politics of nationalism before the Sharif ’s uprising, and by casting their lotwith the Ottomans’ enemies, they had committed themselves irrevocably to therealization of a new regional order based on the idea of Arab independence.Their cohesion along lines of regional origin (there were severe strains betweenIraqi officers and their less numerous Syrian colleagues),102 their connectionswith nationalist societies in Syria and Mesopotamia, and their opportune affilia-tion with a cause that enjoyed the support of the victorious British army, allmade them prime candidates for positions of power and influence in the newArab polities that took shape in the aftermath of Ottoman defeat. As in so manyof the cases reviewed above, it was precisely the exceptional nature of theirwartime experience that, in the transformed circumstances of the postwarperiod, legitimized their claim to have acted on behalf of their captive people’sdesire for independence.

Their vision seemed to be on the verge of fulfillment when Faisal’s NorthernArmy entered Damascus in October 1918 as an independent contingent alliedwith the advancing British forces.103 Many of them went on to assume positionsof leadership in the short-lived Syrian monarchy established by Faisal in 1918(see Chapter 6). France’s subsequent imposition of its rule on Syria and Britain’sassertion of imperial oversight over Iraq was a bitter disappointment to the offi-cers who had led the Arab Revolt. And yet, as we shall see in Chapter 7, thetemptation of gaining high office within the framework of the British mandatein Iraq was to prove difficult to resist.


Conclusion

While within the multinational empires the stresses and strains of total warwidened socio-political fissures along lines of ethnicity and class, outside theimperial frameworks the war opened up new spaces for experiments in massmobilization, political organization, armed action, and the creation of heroiclegends. German (and, for a much shorter period, Ottoman) armies of conquestand occupation removed extensive territories from the control of the Russianempire, and proceeded to introduce schemes of bureaucratic categorization,façades of national self-determination, and divide-and-rule policies that lent newinstitutional and political significance to ethnic identity and that sharpened thelines of distinction and division among nationalities. National committees basedin Allied, Central Power, or neutral capitals prepared the propagandist anddiplomatic groundwork for the realization of separatist programs. POW campscontained captive audiences for the propaganda of national committees and thelegions’ recruitment campaigns. The legions, in turn, sought to flesh out theromantic image of nations in arms.

With the fragmentation of the multinational empires into nation-states in1917–1918, romantic images were transformed into founding myths, nationalcommittees became provisional governments or peace-conference delegations,and ethno-cultural identities that had been reified and institutionalized by occu-pying powers for reasons of political expediency took on new life as frameworksfor national self-determination efforts. It was precisely those nationalist groupsthat had operated outside the boundaries of the Romanov, Ottoman, andHabsburg empires during the war that were, in many instances, best prepared toseize the day upon the collapse of those empires, assuming leading roles in thesuccessor states or seeing their programs and political values – which tended tobe of a liberal or liberal-democratic cast – incorporated into the new states’ insti-tutional and ideological structures.

Such apparent success stories contained the seeds of their own undoing. Thesudden convergence in 1918 of wildly disparate perspectives and experiences –from home fronts, war fronts, occupation, and exile – within the framework ofnewly formed nation-states may have occasionally produced fleeting images ofnational triumph and unity, but in fact added to the intense discord that immedi-ately arose over how to define the boundaries of political and national identity.Moreover, as we shall see in Chapter 7, it was to be one of the many bitterironies of the postwar world that the very elements that had fought the hardestfor a fundamental redistribution of power, themselves sometimes congealed intohardened ruling classes that jealously monopolized power in the face ofmounting social changes and ideological challenges.


The end of the Great War was also the end of the three multinational empires.In their place arose a multitude of new polities with uncertain borders and ill-defined identities. Many of them were ravaged by civil conflicts and inter-statewars for several more years. Even where fighting ceased early, peace did notautomatically bring about a restoration of stability and prosperity. Economicpressures that had been held under the lid by government controls duringwartime were released explosively in the war’s aftermath. Inflation was higheverywhere, and reached astronomical proportions in many parts of EasternEurope. Battered economies could not reabsorb the millions of soldiers andrefugees who returned to their homes. The social and economic dislocation thatfollowed the war was almost as violent in its own way as the continent-wide mili-tary conflict that had just ended. It was amidst these centrifugal forces thatfar-reaching decisions had to be made about the boundaries of identity in thenew polities.

Although the new boundaries were justified as reflections of pre-existing iden-tities or objective ethnographic criteria, the very process of drawing themactually played a powerful role in shaping national identities and in changing orlimiting the terms of debate about nationhood. The problem was that mostethnic groups did not come in neatly wrapped territorial packages. Languages,cultures, and religions were both dispersed and intermingled in a kaleidoscopicfashion throughout the regions we have been examining. Cut-and-dried notionsabout the congruence of nation with state were far removed from the ethno-graphic realities the new states faced. Indeed, the definition of boundariespresented a multidimensional challenge. Lines of demarcation between neigh-boring states were the most obvious and immediate subject of contention.Another issue concerned the exercise and division of sovereignty within states.Were ethnic minorities to be awarded territorially bounded autonomous zones,extraterritorial autonomy, or no collective recognition whatsoever? Was citizen-ship and full juridical equality to be extended to all who resided within theterritory claimed by the state, or were lines – visible or invisible – to be drawnaround certain groups deemed alien to the polity? Conversely, in cases wherepeople who saw themselves as one nation were divided from one another by“artificial” frontiers, how were those barriers to be transcended?

6 Defining the Boundaries ofthe Nation, 1918–1923

Political and institutional responses to these dilemmas were hastily improvisedin the immediate aftermath of the war amidst the often violent clash ofconflicting interests and general conditions of upheaval and chaos. Yet many ofthe resulting arrangements were to remain in place for years to come, with far-reaching consequences for the subsequent evolution of ethnic politics andnationalist ideologies in East Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East.

Defining Frontiers in East Central Europe

The events of October–November 1918 in East Central Europe were a curiousmix of anti-climax, high drama, and uncontrollable confusion. In the space ofjust a few weeks, the region’s political map was transformed beyond recognition.With his troops deserting in droves, national committees seizing power in provin-cial capitals, and the Allied and Associated Powers responding to his desperatediplomatic overtures by tersely referring him to those national committees,Kaiser Karl accepted (on 27 October) the departure of the Czechs, Poles, andSouth Slavs from the imperial fold and handed over power on 11 November to anewly declared Austrian republic formed in the German rump of the formerempire.1 To the north, Germany’s defeat by the Western powers spelled the endof its short-lived empire in Eastern Europe, although German Free Corps unitsremained active (ostensibly as an anti-Bolshevik volunteer force) in the Balticregion well into the following year.2 To the East, the Russian polity was beingconsumed by civil and ethnic war.

Given the abruptness of the Central Powers’ final collapse, the locus of polit-ical authority within many newly declared states was intensely contested, as wasthe delineation of borders among them. The establishment of administrativestructures and the marking of frontiers throughout the region was a matter ofmakeshift arrangements and awkward improvisations – and often the subject ofviolent confrontations.

The political entities that engaged in these struggles for legitimacy andcontrol ranged in nature from self-styled provisional governments formed bywartime émigrés and resistance leaders to governments of pre-existing nation-states that now sought to make good on longstanding irredentist claims againstimperial territories. In Poland, Piłsudski was released from prison and placed inpower by his German captors while Dmowski’s Polish National Committeerepresented the country’s interests in Paris. The leaders of Masaryk’sCzechoslovak National Council returned to Prague with their status as the newcountry’s provisional government already recognized by the major Czech parties,and with a more general statement of support for Czech–Slovak unification froma self-declared Slovak National Council, which expected regional autonomy onthe basis of the Pittsburgh Declaration. Local leaders of the Ukrainian(Ruthenian) community in Subcarpathian Rus’ (the province that became theeastern fringe of the interwar Czechoslovak Republic), following in the steps oftheir émigré community in the United States, also declared themselves in favorof secession from Hungary and adhesion to Masaryk’s new state, on condition of

Defining Boundaries, 1918–1923 157

autonomy. (The Ruthenians of this province were in fact granted a measure oflocal administrative control, unlike the Slovaks – as we shall see in Chapter 7.)3

Hungary also faced the secession of Croatia and the loss of southern and easternterritories to Serbian and Romanian forces, respectively. Count Mihály Károlyi’sleft-of-center coalition government, in charge of the newly declared HungarianPeople’s Republic, deployed military forces to resist the detachment of these

158 Defining Boundaries, 1918–1923

Map 3 The Peace Settlement 1919–1923

Source: Richard and Ben Crampton, Atlas of Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 1996)

lands, but ultimately bowed to the Allied powers’ demands for the withdrawal ofHungarian troops from wide swaths of disputed territory. The short-livedHungarian Soviet Republic that replaced Károlyi’s discredited government inMarch 1919 attempted to recoup some of its predecessor’s losses in the name ofinternational socialism, but was unable to mount effective resistance to arenewed Romanian offensive that ended with the fall of the HungarianCommunists and the occupation of Budapest at the beginning of August.4

In Lithuania, the Taryba, which had for months before the November 1918armistice played a cat-and-mouse game with the German authorities who hadcreated it as a façade for their own control, declared itself the ProvisionalGovernment of Lithuania in November 1918 – and promptly found itselfdefending the country against the Bolsheviks on the one hand and Piłsudski’sPolish forces on the other. In Estonia and Latvia, German defeat on the WesternFront enabled provisional governments led by anti-socialist nationalists to cometo power, while the continued presence of German Free Corps formationscontributed to the defeat of the invading Red Army and to the suppression ofthe sizable pro-Bolshevik elements within the Estonian and Latvian populations.5

The German-assisted victory of the anti-socialist Whites in Finland’s 1918 civilwar left the surviving leaders of the left politically marginalized and the countrydeeply divided for decades, although parliamentary democracy did survive inFinland throughout the interwar years.6

It is not my intention here to provide a detailed narrative of the post-1918diplomatic, political, and military struggles throughout East Central Europe.Instead, I will use selected examples – focussing in particular on the Polish case –to illuminate this chapter’s overarching theme: how the very process of estab-lishing political authority and fixing boundaries under these chaotic conditionsshaped the structure of political institutions and the development of nationalidentities.

With the Western democracies in the position of hegemons at the Paris PeaceConference, and the United States apparently playing the leading role amongthem, Wilsonianism served as the rhetorical framework within which the diplo-matic battles of this period were fought out. The aspect of Wilsonianism mostimmediately relevant to the problems of East Central Europe was its affirmationof national self-determination as the logical corollary of, and foundation for, aliberal-democratic political order. As we have seen, there had been advocates ofa marriage of liberalism and nationalism among the nationalist intelligentsias ofthe region both before the war and – most notably among the national commit-tees in Western exile – during the war itself. But to preach was one thing, topractice another. This became apparent in the unfolding of the diplomatic effortat Paris and in the interplay between that effort and events on the ground in EastCentral Europe.

Woodrow Wilson’s own ideas about the principle of national self-determina-tion were highly ambiguous in their practical implications. His pre-war writingsindicate that he regarded the existence of a common national identity as essen-tial to the success of a democratic society. The example of the United States,


which was foremost in his mind, suggested that national identity need not bebased on ethnicity – indeed, that it could and should be based on a commonhistorical experience and common set of values that transcended ethnicity. Ofcourse, as an immigrant society, the United States constituted an exceptionalcase which marked it apart from the European experience. How then couldWilsonian doctrine be applied to postwar Europe?7

During the war, Wilson delivered a variety of public addresses and policystatements that appeared to elevate national self-determination to the status ofan overarching principle for any future peace settlement, but without clarifyingwhat constituted a nation or what, for that matter, was entailed by self-determi-nation. The practical application of Wilson’s doctrine evolved largely in responseto immediate circumstances and to the political realities taking shape over thecourse of 1918–1919. As long as there appeared to be a chance of negotiating aseparate peace with the Habsburg empire, for instance, it seemed more politic tocall for autonomy for its constituent peoples than for their full-fledged indepen-dence. The failure of the secret diplomatic contacts with Austria–Hungary andthe growing assertiveness of nationalist movements within the empire during thelast months of the war led to official American and Allied endorsement ofCzechoslovak and Yugoslav independence. In the case of Poland, its past historyas a sovereign state earned it Wilson’s early endorsement (in the January 1918Fourteen Points speech) as a candidate for full-fledged independence. It was ofcrucial importance to all three of these causes, as it was to the Zionist cause, thattheir spokesmen in Western capitals spoke the language of liberal democracyand painted visions of their future nation-states as societies bound together bycommon historical and cultural experience and shared political values ratherthan by narrowly ethnic ties (see Chapter 5). Wilson also appears to have had arather poor grasp of the complexity of the region’s ethnography and little senseof how potentially wide was the gap separating the perspective of, say, MilanŠtefánik from that of the Slovak peasantry or of the Yugoslav Committee fromthe Croatian man on the street.8 He came to rue his ignorance:

When I gave utterance to those words (“that all nations had a right to self-determination”), I said them without the knowledge that nationalitiesexisted, which are coming to us day after day. … You do not know andcannot appreciate the anxieties that I have experienced as the result ofmany millions of people having their hopes raised by what I have said.9

Initially, then, Wilson, did not realize how deep might run the tension betweencivic and ethnic categories of political identity among the soon-to-be-liberatedpeoples of East Central Europe. Yet the very process of determining theAmerican position on future boundaries among the new states highlighted thecriterion of ethnic identity to an unprecedented degree. The American Inquiry(a commission of experts formed to lay the groundwork for the American posi-tion on the European peace settlements) focussed its efforts on investigating thedistribution of ethno-linguistic groups in disputed territories, while trying to


balance the ethnic criterion with economic and strategic considerations. Theapproach of British Foreign Office experts – many of them drawn from thecircle of academics associated with the pro-Czechoslovak and pro-Yugoslavpropaganda paper, The New Europe – was not dissimilar.10

If ethnographic research seemed to be the most objective way of resolvingterritorial disputes, the result was to magnify the importance of ethnic identity asa source of political legitimacy far more than Wilson or Lloyd George had everintended. As William Keylor has argued, the very nature of a boundary-markingprocess based on quantifiable criteria drew the Anglo-American architects of thePeace into emphasizing an ethnic basis for nationhood.11 To be sure, seniormembers of the American delegation to Paris, including Secretary of StateLansing, had long harbored serious doubts about the wisdom of implementingnational self-determination doctrine in such a culturally and linguistically diverseregion.12 But given the collapse of the multinational empires, and in the absenceof someone capable of putting those Humpty Dumpties back together again,such critics had no principled or internally consistent method to propose in lieuof the ethnographic approach.

For their part, the interested parties in East Central Europe were quite eagerto introduce additional, non-ethnographic, criteria wherever it might be to theirterritorial advantage to do so. Strategic and economic arguments were putforward on behalf of claims to such regions as the Sudetenland (the Austro-German-populated territorial perimeter of Bohemia, whose mountain rangeswere deemed vital for the defense of Czechoslovakia) or the Polish Corridor (thestretch of formerly German territory that gave Poland access to the sea). Whilesuch arguments were best suited to convincing the Western powers, historicalclaims were often even more compelling from the point of view of nationalistsentiment. As we saw in the preceding chapter, already during the war, theliberal nationalists of the Yugoslav Committee and Czechoslovak NationalCouncil had articulated territorial claims based on the principle of historic stateright, in a sharp departure from their earlier, principled opposition to thisundemocratic notion. In Poland, as discussed in Chapter 3, the typical left-of-center and right-wing positions on historic state right had long been inversed,with Piłsudski arguing in favor of a restoration of Poland within some approxi-mation of its 1772 boundaries, while Dmowski urged against this in favor of anethnically more homogeneous state.

Historic claims raised a fundamental conundrum, for the boundaries referredto were those of early modern states that had not drawn their legitimacy fromthe principle of national self-determination or popular sovereignty. The weddingof such claims to the principle of national self-determination was incongruousby purely liberal-democratic standards, insofar as it could lead to the incorpora-tion of territory regardless of its inhabitants’ wishes.13 And yet, it was preciselythe immutability of territorial configurations based on frozen moments in historythat lent them appeal as symbols of nationhood.14

Where historic claims overlapped with convincing strategic or economic ones(as in the case of the Sudetenland), the Western powers were likely to endorse


them, especially when such demands came at the expense of the defeated powersor their rump successor states – Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, andTurkey. Where claims were put forward on historic bases alone, the Allied andAssociated Powers generally sought to restrain the nationalist enthusiasm forterritorial aggrandizement. In either event, the unilateral use of military forcewas the surest means of making good on territorial demands, with Westernrecognition often coming in the wake of facts created on the ground.

Thus it was that armed action and diplomatic manipulation, rather than thegradual building of popular consensus, served as the means for assemblingdiverse regions and populations into East European “nation-states.” We havealready seen how Serbian military suppression of the Green Cadres laid thefoundation for the creation of the kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. ThePrague government’s claim to Slovakia was realized, not through a mass uprisingof the Slovak people against their Magyar masters, but through a combinationof Czech military operations and Allied diplomatic support that forcedHungarian forces out of the region. Czech forces also clashed with their Polishrivals in a confrontation over the coal-rich Teschen district, which was parti-tioned between the two countries (with Czechoslovakia obtaining control ofTeschen’s main coalfield and railroad) by Allied arbiters in 1920.15 Within itsfinal frontiers, the Czechoslovak “nation-state” ended up with a population thatwas, according to data from the 1930 census, 51 per cent Czech, 22 per centGerman, 16 per cent Slovak, 5 per cent Magyar, and 4 per cent Ruthenian.16

Failure to create a common sense of national identity between the two mainSlavic groups (Czechs and Slovaks) would obviously leave such a polity vulner-able to complete fragmentation.

In Poland, the dispute over Teschen, mentioned above, was only one item ona long menu of conflicts that included military operations against Ukrainianindependence forces in Eastern Galicia, and fighting with Lithuania over Vilnius,which was captured by an ostensibly independent Polish militia in 1920 andformally annexed by the Polish parliament two years later. In 1920, Piłsudski’sregime negotiated an anti-Bolshevik alliance with Symon Petliura’s Kiev-basedUkrainian regime, based on the cession of Eastern Galicia to Poland. Piłsudskithen undertook a full-scale war against the Soviets in which the fortunes of theopposing armies and the position of the front line see-sawed dramatically backand forth from Kiev at the height of Polish success to the outskirts of Warsaw atthe climax of the Bolshevik offensive. The Polish–Soviet Treaty of Riga, whichended the conflict in March 1921, left Poland in control of a wide stretch ofterritory to the east of the Bug river, that is to say, well beyond the Polish ethno-graphic frontier (the so-called Curzon Line) as defined by a committee of theParis Peace Conference. To the west, a combination of military actions, popularuprisings by ethnic Poles, and terms imposed by the Western powers in theVersailles peace treaty helped determine Poland’s boundaries with Germany(with Germany ceding Posen [Poznań] and eastern Pomerania to Poland).17

In the case of Upper Silesia, a coal-rich, industrialized region of mixed Polishand German population, a plebiscite called for by the Western powers resulted in


a majority vote in favor of keeping the province in Germany. When this wasfollowed by Polish uprisings and a 1921 League of Nations decision to partitionthe province, many Germans were reinforced in their perception that thenational self-determination principle was being applied only to their detrimentand never in their favor.18

The Polish example merits examination in greater detail as a case that vividlyilluminates the close relationship between the process of boundary-formationand the evolution of nationalist political cultures. It also encapsulates the half-hearted, self-contradictory, and inconsistent character of the Western powers’effort to promote liberal nationalism in East Central Europe.

The two most mettlesome subjects of negotiations between the Poles19 andthe Council of Four20 concerned Poland’s eastern frontiers and the future statusand treatment of minority communities within the Polish state. On the firstpoint, the conflicting Polish and Ukrainian claims to Eastern Galicia constituteda particularly maddening issue, which, like so many others, was ultimatelyresolved by force. In the Paris talks, Ignacy Paderewski freely acknowledged thatthe majority of Eastern Galicia’s population spoke Ukrainian, but insisted thatthe mostly Polish town of Lwów (also known as Lviv in Ukrainian, Lvov inRussian, and Lemberg in German and Yiddish) could not conceivably be leftstranded to the east of Poland’s frontiers.21 Coming at a time when Czech,Romanian, and Yugoslav forces were busily creating faits accompli at the expenseof Hungary, the Polish military advance in Eastern Galicia awakened the angerand frustration of the Big Four over an Eastern Europe that seemed to be spin-ning out of control, defying all Western efforts at implementing a stable postwarsettlement. As British Prime Minister David Lloyd George put it to Paderewski:

We liberated the Poles, the Czechoslovaks, the Yugoslavs, and today we haveall the trouble in the world preventing them from oppressing other races. Imyself belong to a small nation [the Welsh]. I have the warmest and mostprofound sympathy for small nations which are fighting for their indepen-dence, and I am seized with despair when I see them more imperialisticthan the great nations themselves.

Even more blunt was Lloyd George’s outburst four days later, à propos the attackson Hungary by its Czech and Romanian neighbors: “They are all little brigandpeoples who only want to steal territories.”22

In a word, the Western leaders were impatient with what they regarded aspetty ethnic disputes unleashed under the cover of the national self-determina-tion principle, and eager to get such annoying matters off their agenda asquickly as possible. In the absence of any clear-cut set of principles that couldresolve such intractable disputes, and given the sense that some solution wasurgently needed, de facto arrangements tended to form the basis for de jure solu-tions. Western fear of Bolshevism also played into the hands of nationalistregimes that portrayed themselves as vital buffers against the Red threat. In the


case of Eastern Galicia, the upshot – after a stream of ineffectual threats againstthe Poles – was a retroactive validation of the Polish military advance. On 26 June1919, the peace conference’s Supreme Council23 issued a ruling awarding Polandthe responsibility for creating a provisional civil administration over EasternGalicia. This, in turn, eventually led to the recognition of Polish sovereignty overthe region.24

The Polish case vividly illustrates how both the use of military force to makegood on territorial claims, and the process of diplomatic negotiation, served toblur the distinctions between liberal-civic and ethnic-chauvinist conceptions ofnational identity and, indeed, to favor the latter over the former. Piłsudski mayhave justified his military campaigns in the east as part of an effort to forge afederative framework for national self-determination that would at the sametime create a strong bulwark against Russian expansionism. But in practice, hewas engaged in a process of conquest that was bitterly resisted by Lithuaniansand Ukrainians (except when the latter’s defeat by the Bolsheviks left them withno one else to turn to but Piłsudski). In any event, Polish war weariness and lackof support from the Dmowski bloc obliged Piłsudski to compromise with theSoviets in the Peace of Riga and to abandon his program for a federation withUkraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The upshot, by 1921, wasa Poland one-third of whose population consisted of non-Poles, many of whomfelt bitterly alienated from a state that had forcibly incorporated them into itself.By the same token, the Polish government felt it had little reason to negotiateterms of autonomy with minorities upon which it had already successfullyimposed its rule. In practice, the vicissitudes of warfare had left Piłsudski incharge of a Polish state whose territorial configuration and whose denial ofpolitical space to non-Polish minorities conformed more closely to Dmowski’spreconceptions than to his own. Moreover, the central role of the military inshaping and defending the frontiers of the state served to enhance its role assymbol of national honor and its self-image as vanguard of the nation. This wasto have a significant impact on Polish political culture in subsequent years, as weshall see in Chapter 7.

Given the haphazard nature of boundary formation, the blurriness of ethno-graphic frontiers, and the unwillingness or inability of the Big Four to restrainsome of these small-power expansionist initiatives, it was unavoidable that largeminority populations would be left stranded within the new, so-called nation-states. It was with a view to regulating the treatment of such communitiesthrough a regime of international law that the drafting and negotiation ofminorities treaties was initiated by the Big Four.25

The issue that brought the matter of minorities to the formal attention of theParis Peace Conference concerned the fate of Jews in Poland. We have seen (inthe preceding chapter) how the German occupation of Poland and Lithuaniacatalyzed the institutionalization of Jewish cultural and political life and stimu-lated debate about the possible forms that Jewish national autonomy might takein a restored Polish state. The wartime plight of East European Jews, particularly


under the impact of the Russian military’s abuses in 1914–1915, had also gener-ated an outpouring of concern on the part of the Jewish public and Jewishorganizations in the United States, Britain, and France. Wartime activity by suchorganizations had focussed on furnishing material relief to refugees and destitutecommunities.26 With the war over, attention shifted to protecting Jewish indi-vidual and communal rights in the framework of the new nation-states –particularly Poland, which, with some three million Jews (roughly 10 per cent ofits population) in its final territorial configuration, ended up as the Europeancountry with by far the largest number of Jewish inhabitants outside of Russia.The existence of widespread popular and political anti-Semitism in Poland, asmanifested by the continued boycott (initiated in 1912) of Jewish businesses byDmowski’s National Democrats and in outbursts of violence against Jewishinhabitants upon the entry of Polish forces into Lwów and Vilnius during1918–1919, made the future of Jewish life in that country the subject of partic-ular concern to world Jewry.

Jewish organizations and political movements were divided over how to definethe communal rights of Poland’s Jews. Zionists, who dominated the jointcommittee of East European Jewish delegations at the Peace Conference andenjoyed the support of the American Jewish Congress, demanded that Polandand other East European states recognize their Jewish residents as members of adistinct nation, with the right to collective representation at both state and inter-national levels. This would entail the creation of a separate Jewish parliament inPoland,27 alongside a state parliament representing all the country’s inhabitants,and it would mean the creation of a Jewish seat at the League of Nations.28

In demanding formal, corporate, political/diplomatic status for a territoriallydispersed nation, as distinct from a state, the Zionists were challenging tradi-tional notions about the indivisibility of state sovereignty and proposing a radicaland potentially precedent-setting new formulation of the relationship betweennational identity and government authority. In so doing, they were underliningand responding to the deepseated contradiction between the liberal-democraticand ethno-cultural dimensions of the national self-determination principle.29 Butthe response this program evoked among East European and Western govern-ments alike was not based on the originality of its contribution to political theory.As a potential model that other ethnic minorities – and especially ethnicGermans – might seek to emulate, it was regarded as having the potential tounleash uncontrollable centrifugal forces in a region already suffering from deepinstability. Neither the American, British, nor French delegations to the ParisPeace Conference were willing to promote an approach to the minorities ques-tion that would create what they saw as a nightmare scenario of states arisingwithin states.30

Some non-Zionist Jewish organizations, such as France’s Alliance IsraéliteUniverselle or the delegation representing Poland’s Jewish assimilationists, wereutterly opposed to any policy that would formalize the status of Polish Jewry as aseparate, corporate entity. Their focus was on the protection of Jews’ individualrights to citizenship and equal treatment in the countries they inhabited, and on


their right to practice their religion freely. Any institutionalization of Yiddish orHebrew as officially recognized languages was opposed by these groups as anundesirable barrier to the integration of Jews into surrounding cultures.

Steering a middle course between Zionists and assimilationists was LucienWolf, “foreign secretary” and representative at the Paris Peace Conference of theJoint Foreign Committee of British Jews, the successor to the ConjointCommittee (see Chapter 5). Wolf forged a platform that he felt stood a reason-able chance of winning Foreign Office endorsement while granting aconsiderable measure of protection under international law to the Jews ofPoland. He advocated a program that would involve Polish state sanction andfunding for autonomous Jewish national-cultural institutions, such as a Yiddish-language school network linked to the general education system. Moreover, helobbied hard in favor of making full Western recognition of Poland contingenton that country’s submission to League of Nations oversight over its treatment ofJews and other minorities, with minority groups having the right of direct appealto the League Council – and thence to the Permanent Court of InternationalJustice – over alleged infringements of their rights. Fair treatment would includefull civil rights for Jews as individuals as well as guarantees of freedom of reli-gious practice and freedom to develop cultural and communal institutionswithout state interference. Wolf also sought to ensure that Jews would beexempted from a general ban on Sunday trading, given their own observance ofSaturday as a day of rest.31

Intense lobbying by the American and British Jewish organizations,conducted amidst an atmosphere of public outrage over violence against Jewishcommunities by Polish forces operating in the fledgling country’s war zones,spurred the Council of Four into placing the issue of minority rights in Polandspecifically, and Eastern Europe generally, on its agenda. A hastily formedCommittee on New States was charged with formulating a Polish MinoritiesTreaty that would serve as a model to be applied throughout the region. At thecore of this initiative was an effort to make the Polish state’s obligations towardits minorities – including its obligation to concede them some institutional guar-antees of cultural self-expression and self-perpetuation through communalorganizations and native-language school instruction – a matter of internationallaw, under the guarantee of the League of Nations.32

Negotiations with the Polish delegation over the matter were a prickly affair.The very idea of making the Polish state treaty-bound to observe an externallyprescribed set of guidelines regarding an aspect of its domestic affairs wasdeemed offensive. If, in the Poles’ eyes, the international framework of such aminority-rights program infringed on Polish sovereignty, its substance threatenedPolish national unity. Rather than acknowledging the need to create some systemof cultural autonomy that might help accommodate the ethno-cultural pluralismof the territories claimed by the Polish National Committee, Paderewski invokedthe West European ideal of civic unity to protest against what he saw as anattempt to undermine Poland’s cohesion as a nation-state. Blaming Jewish disloy-


alty for the prevalent mood of anti-Semitism in Poland, and displaying morethan a hint of such sentiment himself, Paderewski argued that:

The Great Powers … by distinguishing with the aid of special privileges theJewish population from their fellow-citizens – create a new Jewish problem.… It is to be feared that the Great Powers may be preparing for themselvesunwelcome surprises, for, taking into consideration the migratory capacitiesof the Jewish population, which so readily transports itself from one State toanother, it is certain that the Jews, basing themselves on precedent thusestablished, will claim elsewhere the national principles which they wouldenjoy in Poland.33

In its final form, the Polish Minorities Treaty signed on 28 June 1919 fell farshort of the cultural autonomy framework proposed by Wolf, let alone thenational-political autonomy called for by the Zionists. Individual rights toequality under the law and religious freedom were protected, but the collectiverights of minorities remained quite limited. Minorities were to be free to createtheir own cultural and social institutions and private schools, but, in publicschools, minority tongues could be used as the language of instruction only atthe primary-school level.34 Articles dealing specifically with the Jews likewisegave them the right to employ Yiddish as the language of instruction in somepublic primary schools, but not in secondary education. And while the Jews’right to observe the Sabbath was protected, no provision was made exemptingJews from the general ban on commercial activity on Sundays. This left obser-vant Jews in the position of being obliged to observe a compulsory second day ofrest that placed them at a disadvantage vis-à-vis their non-Jewish competitors.While the League of Nations Council (the executive committee of Great Powers)was named as the treaty’s guarantor, alleged violations of its provisions couldonly be brought before the Council by one of the Council members; Jewishorganizations were to have no direct channel of appeal to the League ofNations.35

The Polish Minorities Treaty served as a model that was applied throughoutEastern Europe and the Balkans. Its provisions were replicated, with minor vari-ations, in the minority treaties signed by thirteen other European states seekingWestern diplomatic recognition of their independence or of their revised bound-aries, or negotiating peace treaties with the West. Yet, from the point of view ofthe Western powers, the fundamental objective of the treaties was to smooth thepath to peaceful assimilation of minorities into state-promoted frameworks ofnational identity. As far as the East European and Balkan regimes wereconcerned, the treaties were either affronts to their countries’ dignity assovereign states or tools to be employed opportunistically in regional territorialand political rivalries. The weakness of the treaties’ enforcement mechanismsmeant that, in practice, the new and expanded states were free to subject theirminorities to systematic patterns of abuse.36

In Poland, as elsewhere throughout Eastern and Central Europe, right-wing


parties regularly whipped up and exploited popular hostility toward minorities –especially Jews – as a means of bolstering their own electoral support among themajority group’s population, while left-wing parties expected to pick up minorityvotes by default, without overly exerting themselves on behalf of those ethnicgroups’ special interests.37 In the 1922 elections, a Jewish-initiated minorities’electoral coalition (the Bloc of National Minorities; Blok MniejszosciNarodowych – BMN), which included Jewish, German, Ukrainian, Belorussian,and Lithuanian parties, emerged with what appeared to be a powerful swingvote in the lower house of parliament – this despite a gerrymandered districtingsystem designed to limit minority votes. But the hostility of the Polish Right,combined with the reluctance of the PPS and other left-wing formations totarnish their own nationalist credentials through overt cooperation with ethnicparties, limited the influence of the BMN. Its brief moment of success in helpingelect a left-of-center Piłsudskiite, Narutowicz, as President of the Republic in1922 only played into the hands of the National Democrats’ propaganda, whichvilified Narutowicz as the plaything of Jews and other non-Polish nationalities.Following Narutowicz’s assassination and replacement by a more conservativefigure, the BMN declined as a political force, with some of its constituent partiesseeing greater immediate advantage in trying to cut limited, bilateral deals withPolish governments than in continued cooperation with one another, whileothers retreated into bitter opposition.

Such political dynamics both reflected and contributed to the minorities’vulnerability to oppression and abuse. Poland’s eastern lands (referred to as thekresy in Polish) were governed virtually as colonial territories. The Belorussianpopulation, whose national consciousness was deemed least distinctive and devel-oped, was targeted for Polonization. A mixture of forced Polonization anddivide-and-rule strategies were attempted among Ukrainians, as manifest in suchpolicies as the unsuccessful – indeed, provocative – attempt to cultivate a sepa-rate Ruthenian ethnic identity among members of the Uniate Church.Half-hearted efforts at land reform in the kresy repeatedly ended with the bulk ofproperty remaining in the hands of the Polish landlords – a regional socio-economic elite whose support was courted by both Dmowski’s and Piłsudski’spolitical camps. The prime beneficiaries of whatever real redistribution did takeplace tended to be Polish settlers rather than indigenous Ukrainian or other non-Polish peasants. Violence ensued as terrorist tactics by right-wing Ukrainiannationalists provoked brutal responses from the state authorities.

Intermittent attempts at appeasement of, or compromise with, regionalminorities proved abortive, even after Piłsudski’s dramatic return from politicalretirement through a coup d’état in 1926 (see Chapter 7). Although Piłsudski didcurb official anti-Semitism, his credibility as a champion of minority rightsrapidly dissipated as administrative inertia and local resistance by right-wingPolish nationalists impeded the implementation of liberal policies designed toprovide equal access to economic and educational opportunity and local admin-istrative authority for minorities. It soon became apparent that limitedconcessions were all Piłsudski could deliver in return for parliamentary support


from ethnic-minority parties. In consequence, relations between state authoritiesand minority populations in the kresy (especially Eastern Galicia) rapidly degen-erated into violence once again. In September 1934, Poland unilaterallywithdrew from the system of international oversight of minorities’ treatmentthat had been enshrined in the 1919 Minorities Treaty.

While the Polish state’s repressive policies succeeded in maintaining thecountry’s territorial integrity until 1939, they were utterly counterproductivefrom the point of view of national unity. The more powerless and exploitedminority groups felt, the stronger grew their sense that ethnicity was the mostimportant element in determining their fate and in shaping their identity. At thesame time, the fact that interwar Poland did tolerate political activity andprivately funded cultural and educational endeavors by some of its minorities(notably Jews and Germans) enabled them to develop institutional expressions oftheir ethnonational consciousness.38 This dynamic, in which coercive attempts atthe nationalization of culture and identity by the state only stimulated theconsolidation of distinct ethnonational identities among minorities, was repli-cated to various degrees in virtually all the other states of interwar East Centraland Eastern Europe.39

Thus, in Romania, whose territory and population had doubled (at theexpense of formerly Austro-Hungarian and Russian territory) under the terms ofthe peace settlement, an early experiment with regional administrative autonomy(albeit favoring local ethnic Romanians) gave way in 1922 to a rigidly centralistgovernmental and educational structure, justified as the best way of rapidlyinculcating a sense of national unity among the hitherto fragmented Romanianpeople. This impatient, top-down approach to forging a cohesive nation waspartly an overcompensatory response to the fact that the urban, middle-class,educated population of the new territories was overwhelmingly composed ofGermans, Magyars, and Jews, while the bulk of the peasantry was ethnicallyRomanian.40 Antagonism toward non-Romanians – who now constituted 30 percent of the country’s population as opposed to 12 per cent before the war – ranall the deeper because of the fact that Germans and Magyars had beenmembers of the hegemonic nationalities in the Habsburg empire, while the Jewshad tended to assimilate into Magyar and German culture, or else retained theirYiddish language, rather than adopt the peasantry’s Romanian.41

Here again, attempts to forge interethnic political coalitions proved unsuc-cessful. Divide-and-rule tactics pursued by the authorities in Bucharestcontributed to this, but perhaps more interesting is the fact that the generalgeopolitical framework of the Greater Romanian nation-state constituted anenvironment that reversed earlier trends toward cultural assimilation amongethnic groups. In the formerly Hungarian-ruled Banat, Germans, many ofwhom had begun adopting the language of the regional Magyar elite under theold regime, were now at pains to distinguish themselves from an identity that wasassociated with the irredentism of the rump Hungarian republic (and henceseemed to constitute a political liability). Magyarized Jews were likewise moreinclined than before to stress that their love of Hungarian culture did not mean


they saw themselves as part of the Hungarian nation. At the same time, therewas no tradition among any of these groups of adopting as their own aRomanian language more closely associated in their experience with peasant lifethan with high culture. Each minority’s sense of vulnerability vis-à-vis thenational state, combined with the broadening of cultural and political gapsamong the ethnic minorities, strengthened the tendency toward ethnic particu-larism in the new territories of Greater Romania.42 At the same time, theRomanian government failed to fulfill its professed goal of empowering theethnically Romanian rural masses in the country’s newly acquired regions. InTransylvania, for instance, large estates were expropriated from Magyarlandowners and much of the income from local industrial production wassiphoned off through taxation, but the beneficiaries of these blows against thenon-Romanian elites were wealthy Romanian financiers and investors based inBucharest rather than the local Romanian peasantry.43 Such frustrating patternsof development, combined with the Romanian government’s discriminationagainst minorities and toleration of anti-Semitic violence, fed the growth of thefascist Iron Guard movement, which brought together Romanian students andpeasants in an organized challenge to the legitimacy of parliamentary govern-ment and provoked the establishment of a royal dictatorship in 1938.44

Serb insistence on running the kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes on acentralist, Serb-dominated basis had a similar impact, as did the denial ofautonomy to Slovaks in Czechoslovakia (see Chapter 7). In one case afteranother, the attempts of the new or enlarged East European nation-states toassimilate, marginalize, or suppress their minorities only served to reinforce thesense that ethnicity was the critical element that determined one’s status, social-support network, identity, and even ideological orientation. The less willingnationalist regimes were to create political space or public fora for the expressionof collective identity by minorities, the more alienated the latter became and themore deeply ingrained their sense that they constituted nations unto themselves.The fact that so many wartime programs of national liberation had held forththe promise of federal structures to accommodate ethno-cultural pluralism madethe denial of such rights all the more galling. In many cases, the resultant atmo-sphere of political polarization and fragmentation among ethnic groups led toever more drastic turns toward right-wing, intolerant forms of nationalism andhelped disable and discredit liberal-democratic institutions and values.45

Finally, the division of empires into nation-states also meant the fragmenta-tion of large economic units into smaller ones. The determination to buildself-reliant national economies in each of the new or enlarged states led to araising of tariff barriers, which only served to impede the flow of goods andservices and to cut off producers from their markets. This in turn made thesecountries – most of them economically underdeveloped in the first place andgrievously afflicted by the infrastructure damage of the First World War – all themore vulnerable to the impact of the Great Depression of the 1930s, which cutshort the beginnings of economic recovery in the late 1920s. The resultant hard-ships – persistent agrarian crises, shortage of capital and tightness of credit,


decline in industrial profits and in state revenue, unemployment, low standardsof living – also played into the hands of right-wing nationalists eager to scape-goat minorities or neighboring states for the material woes of their people.46

The Political Geography of Soviet Ethnofederalism

Of the three imperial realms examined in this volume, the only one mostly to bereconstituted as a unitary state following its wartime disintegration was the areaformerly known as the Russian empire. But of course, the ideological orientationand institutional structure of the regime under whose auspices this reassemblytook place represented the most radical of departures from earlier politicalnorms. With respect to the nationality question, the Soviet Union implementedthe principle of ethnofederalism on an unparalleled scale and to an unprece-dented degree of systematization. In this case, therefore, it is the drawing ofnational frontiers within the new, supranational state that primarily concerns us.This system developed from an unusually complex interplay of Communistideology, opportunism, and political experience gained in the course of theRussian Civil War.

The Ethnic Dimension of Russian Political Collapse and CivilWar

In the course of the Russian Civil War (1917–1921), the non-Russian nationali-ties were caught between Bolshevik and White (anti-Bolshevik) armies (not tospeak of German and Ottoman forces until late 1918, the Allied interventionforces from 1918 until 1920, and the invading Polish army in Ukraine andBelorussia during 1920). Many ethnic groups were themselves internally dividedbetween conservative and revolutionary factions that were sporadically alignedwith corresponding elements in the chaotic Russian political scene. Given theanarchic state of affairs prevailing across the length and breadth of the formerempire, it is very difficult to make any meaningful generalizations about thedevelopment of national consciousness or nationalist institutions among the non-Russian peoples during the Civil War.47

In the Baltic theater, geopolitical circumstances – notably, German interven-tion in the Finnish civil war of January–May 1918, the persistence of GermanFree Corps units in Latvia and Estonia following the November 1918 armistice,eventual British naval support and arms deliveries to the Latvians and Estoniansin the wake of a 1919 takeover bid by the Free Corps, and the Bolsheviks’distraction by military threats from first White Russian and then Polish forces –allowed centrist and right-wing nationalists to consolidate independence and tosuppress pro-Bolshevik elements within their own populations.48

In Transcaucasia, the Ottoman advance and Russian military disintegrationhad spurred the creation of a Transcaucasian regional government that func-tioned as an uneasy coalition of Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani leaders.Following the Bolsheviks’ signing away of Transcaucasian territory to the


Ottomans (under the guise of the national self-determination principle, whoseimplementation in the region the Ottomans were supposedly to oversee) in theMarch 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Georgian and Armenian leaders’ reluc-tance to break away entirely from Russia gave way to a recognition that theywere functionally on their own in any case, and that they might gain a betterbargaining position in the framework of an independent state. The Azerbaijaniswere essentially pro-Ottoman to begin with, and eager to break their ties toRussia.

It was on the basis of these highly mixed and incompatible motives that theTranscaucasian legislature (Seim) voted on 22 April 1918 in favor of creating anindependent Transcaucasian Federation, which fell apart into three independentrepublics by the end of May. There had been no basis here for a true union, asrenewed attempts at military resistance to advancing Ottoman forces failed and asthe Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani leaderships developed different diplo-matic and military postures toward the Germans and Ottomans – allies who wereeach other’s rivals for influence in resource-rich Transcaucasia. The Georgiandeclaration of independence (26 May 1918) – which precipitated the breakup ofthe Transcaucasian federation – freed the Georgian government to sign agree-ments with the Germans that gave the latter control over ports, railroads, andmining concessions in Georgia in return for German support against theencroachment of the Ottomans. The latter were accordingly limited to annexinga relatively small chunk of Georgian territory in the peace treaty of June 1918(signed simultaneously with the Armenian–Ottoman and Azerbaijani–Ottomanpeace accords). The Armenians – whose territory was of less strategic significance– were unsuccessful at engaging the interest of the Germans and hence obliged toaccept more difficult terms for peace with the Ottomans, only to attempt theoccupation of formerly Armenian-inhabited territory in northeastern Turkeyafter the Allied–Ottoman armistice of October 1918. The Azerbaijaniswelcomed the Ottomans with open arms and were rewarded by Istanbul’s recog-nition of their independence and territorial integrity, only to lose faith inOttoman professions of pan-Turkic solidarity during the months of oppressive, ifinformal, military occupation that followed.49

Much of this region remained beyond the reach of Russian armies during theheight of the Civil War, thanks in part to the effective cover of British forces thatoccupied Transcaucasia during 1918–1919, following the Central Powers’defeat. This enabled the three republics’ governments to consolidate somemeasure of internal control and to gain de facto diplomatic recognition from theWestern powers (who had, however, no serious intention of renewed militaryintervention on their behalf) in November 1919.50

In the case of Georgia, the gaining of political independence was an osten-sibly incongruous development, since its Menshevik leaders were officiallyopposed to nationalism and had in fact been prominent participants in all-Russian Social Democratic politics until November 1917. However, havingdeclared independence under the force of circumstances, the Georgian govern-ment soon found itself caught up in that crucible of nationalism, the fight over


frontiers. It engaged in military campaigns against the Armenian republic (whichwas also intermittently at war with Azerbaijan) over disputed territory, whilesuppressing internal minorities (Abkhazians, Ossetians) seeking their own self-determination. The fact that the Russian heartland was controlled by the rivalBolshevik Party lent ideological legitimacy to the Georgian Mensheviks’ new-found commitment to their country’s independence. It was not until early1921 that Bolshevik forces gained control over Georgia. They had alreadysubjugated Armenia and Azerbaijan in 1920 through a combination of polit-ical subversion and military operations – a process of territorial consolidationthat was facilitated by Moscow’s alliance of convenience with MustafaKemal’s forces in eastern Turkey (see below).51

In other regions, the repeated passage of rival armies, foreign anddomestic, created such social and political havoc as to defy coherent descrip-tion. The Ukraine, for instance, was nominally governed during 1917–1920by a succession of nine different regimes, none of which succeeded in estab-lishing its authority throughout the countryside. Many of the Muslimterritories also experienced tremendous political upheaval, with some left-wingJadids allying themselves with the Bolsheviks, while guerrillas (Basmachis)backed by both peasants and clerical elites offered armed resistance toBolshevik conquest and occupation in Turkestan.52 It is safe to say that thechaotic conditions of revolution and war were not conducive to the blos-soming of liberal-democratic or social-democratic institutions in any of theseregions.53

One of the political tactics employed by the Bolsheviks in their life-or-death struggle in the Civil War was their promise of cultural and politicalautonomy to the non-Russian nationalities. The tsarist generals whocommanded the various anti-Bolshevik armies, by contrast, paid little heed tothe ethnic factor and openly adhered to a traditional, autocratic, Russocentricapproach to the nationalities issue. As Bolshevik forces advanced into ethni-cally non-Russian territories, they set up national republics and autonomousregions. The regions were incorporated directly into the Russian state, whichwas constituted as a federated republic (the Russian Soviet Federative SocialistRepublic (RSFSR)). The republics initially enjoyed nominal independence, butwere subordinated in key policy areas to the authority of RSFSR ministries.In practice, local Bolshevik authorities were often ethnic Russians (or peoplewho had become Russified in language and identity) who rode roughshodover the sentiments and interests of the local population. This ethnic tensionwas often compounded by an element of class conflict: Bolsheviks tended tobe recruited from among Russian and Russified urban workers who had littlein common with the predominantly non-Russian peasantry of the surroundingcountryside.

The ethnic dimension of the Civil War helped shape Lenin’s approach tothe nationality question. It reinforced his growing conviction that transcendingethnic division in the interests of class solidarity depended on reining in theethnic intolerance of many Russian Bolsheviks, and indulging the self-esteem


of non-Russian nationalities, while keeping political power firmly in the handsof the party. It was this approach that was to shape the formal architecture ofthe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

The Soviet Ethnofederal Experiment

As we saw above, the Western powers at the Paris Peace Conference had limitedcontrol over events transpiring in Eastern Europe. They often found themselvesin the position of retroactively legitimizing locally imposed solutions to boundarydisputes. They were also generally befuddled by the seemingly insuperable chal-lenge of reconciling civic-democratic ideals with ethnographic notions ofnationhood. The Bolsheviks, in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War, were in avery different position. They were the undisputed masters of most of formerimperial Russia’s territory, and relatively free to impose whatever approach to thenationalities question that they saw fit. They too had an ideal of civic (class-based, rather than democratic) patriotism that they wished to promote, butprecisely because they were pursuing their experiment within a single, multina-tional state, they had the luxury (or so they thought) of implementing theethnographic principle on a systematic basis without in any way derogating fromthe power and authority of their supranational state. In their dialectical formula,ethnic identity was to be decoupled from state-wide political identity, andthereby reconciled with it, and, ultimately, transformed into a conduit for it.

Prior to 1917, the Bolshevik platform54 had endorsed the principle ofnational self-determination, interpreting it in the radical sense of the right ofnationalities to break away from the Russian empire to form independentnation-states. This stance allowed them to distance themselves completely fromRussian nationalism and to form tactical alliances with separatist movements,while at the same time providing ideological cover for their rejection of thefederalist approach endorsed by more moderate socialist parties. In other words,what they proposed was an either/or solution: those nationalities whose revolu-tionary classes wished to break away from Russia would be free in principle to doso, while those remaining within the Russian fold would make no claim to terri-torial or cultural autonomy. The principle of the centralized socialist state wouldthus not be compromised; the only question was whether in the short run,pending worldwide revolution, there would be one centralized socialist state orseveral such polities.

Following the November 1917 Revolution, Lenin performed an ideologicalabout-face, convincing his comrades to endorse the principle of federalism bothas a practical means of drawing the borderlands of the crumbled Russianempire into the Soviet fold and as a propagandist gesture designed to inspirerevolutionary zeal among the subjects of the European colonial empires in Asiaby demonstrating how equitably a socialist state treated its non-Europeanpeoples.55

During the Civil War, a Commissariat of Nationality Affairs headed by


Map

4Fe

dera

l Str

uctu

re o

fth

e U

SSR

, 193

9So

urce

: Rob

ert S

. Kai

ser,

The

Geo

grap

hy o

fN

atio

nalis

m in

Rus

sia a

nd th

e USS

R, c

opyr

ight

© 1

994

by P

rinc

eton

Uni

vers

ity P

ress

. Rep

rint

ed b

ype

rmis

sion

of

Prin

ceto

n U

nive

rsity

Pre

ss.

Balti

cSe

aB

aren

ts

Sea

Kara

Sea

EastS

iberia

n

Sea

Lapt

ev S

ea

Ber

ing

Sea

Sea

of

Okh

otsk

Sea

of

Japa

n

Bla

ckS

ea

CaspianSea

Ara

lS

ea

L.Bal

khas

h

L.B

aykal

Joseph Stalin had been created to oversee relations with and policy toward thenational minorities, but, as indicated above, improvisation and inconsistencycharacterized wartime nationality policy. Having ultimately fought a campaignto reconquer as much as possible of former imperial Russian territory from theembryonic nation-states that had sprung up on its soil, the Communist regimemoved in the early 1920s toward the creation of a system that would pave theway for the propagation of a new, state-wide, Soviet identity based on the orga-nizing principle of international working-class solidarity and commoncommitment to Communist ideals.56

The ethnic dimension of this social-engineering project was addressedthrough an extraordinarily methodical attempt to recognize, organize,modernize, and control ethnonational identities through formal institutionalstructures. It was Lenin’s firm belief – reinforced by the successes and failures ofBolshevik nationalities policy during the Civil War – that separatist sentimentsamong the non-Russian masses were a product not only of manipulation by self-interested elites, but of the long history of state-sponsored Russian nationalchauvinism and exploitation. The bitter resentments that this had caused couldbe defused, he contended, by eliminating chauvinist impulses in Russian society(and within the Bolshevik party itself) and by granting the non-Russian nationali-ties recognition of their cultural and linguistic identities. By placing all ethnicgroups – including the Russians – on an equal standing with one another, withinthe framework of a political system that enshrined class consciousness and ideo-logical orientation as the criteria for membership or exclusion, the sources ofinterethnic tension and separatist sentiments would be removed.

Soviet nationalities policy in the 1920s rested on three pillars: the territorial-juridical, the cultural, and the socio-economic.

The character of the Soviet Union as multinational polity was enshrined asan integral aspect of the December 1922 Union Agreement (ratified as the foun-dation of the USSR’s Constitution in 1923–1924). This established the formalpolitical architecture of the state as a federation of sovereign national republics –the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Not only was every majorethnic group allocated a republic of its own, but minorities within each republicwere awarded autonomous sub-units of their own. This hierarchical structure ofbounded territorial units was in some cases even extended to the level of indi-vidual villages whose association with a particular nationality was formallyrecognized.57

The political sovereignty of the republics and of their sub-units was purelynotional. While the USSR’s constitution guaranteed each republic’s right tosecede from the union, any actual hint of separatism was ruthlessly repressed asa manifestation of anti-Communist subversion. Moreover, the highly centralizedauthority of the Communist Party of the USSR (as the Russian CommunistParty was renamed in 1925) – the only legal political party in the country –belied the federative structure of the government.58

But Soviet federalism did have cultural content. Each territorial unit culti-vated its own language as its official tongue, to be taught in schools, used in


newspapers and journals, and employed in literary, theatrical, and cinematicproductions. Precisely because Marxist doctrine conceived national identity to bea relatively ephemeral phenomenon on the path to a classless society, Lenin feltthat multifarious languages and folkloric traditions could and should be used toconvey the identical ideological message – a message that was “national in form,socialist in content.”

In pursuing this approach, the Bolsheviks clearly went far beyond classicalMarxism’s facile dismissal of national identity as a socio-political force. Indeed,the methods of the architects of Soviet nationalities policy were partly modeledon the system developed by Nikolai I. Il’minskii (1822–1891), a nineteenth-century lay missionary who sought to draw non-Russian peoples (Tatars,Chuvash, and others) of the Middle Volga region into the ranks of the RussianOrthodox Church by legitimizing and encouraging the use of their nativelanguages for liturgical purposes. This in turn led to the establishment of native-language schools. In the case of peoples whose languages had no written form,Il’minskii and his disciples created literary versions through transcription into theCyrillic alphabet, standardizing grammar and phonology in the process.59 TheSoviet ethnographers of the 1920s played a similarly active role – albeit on a farmore extensive scale – in defining a uniform linguistic standard for each ethnicgroup. (The Arabic scripts used by most Muslim peoples were replaced by theLatin alphabet in the 1920s, which gave way in turn to Cyrillic in the 1930s.)This endeavor itself was part of an all-encompassing effort to map out the entirecountry’s ethnographic composition, using linguistic, anthropological, cultural,and socio-economic criteria to differentiate among the hundreds of nationalities.Having applied a unidimensional ethnic label to each segment of the population,the Soviet state could go on to assign it its territory, standardize its language andfolklore, reify its identity, and employ its language, officially sanctioned folklore,and identity as conduits for the inculcation of socialist ideals and of loyalty tothe Soviet state that had made this realization of national self-determinationpossible.

The showcasing of the USSR as a harmonious, voluntary community ofautonomous nations was also an integral aspect of Soviet foreign propaganda: itsuggested the possibility of other nations joining the union60 and it was held upas a model of how to reconfigure relations between imperial nations and theirsubjects, in contrast to the continued subjugation of large segments of the globeto European colonialism. Indeed, the prospects of stimulating nationalist revolu-tions against European imperial hegemony in Asia seemed brighter than thechances of provoking an immediate proletarian uprising on the streets ofLondon or Paris; hence the convening in Baku in September 1920 of theCongress of the Peoples of the East, an abortive and at times (as when the headof the Communist International called for an anti-imperial jihad) comicalattempt by the Bolsheviks to create a framework of coordination for an unlikelyassortment of nationalists and/or Communist sympathizers from across theAsian continent (including Soviet Central Asia).61

Finally, Soviet nationalities policy of the 1920s was intimately linked to the


Communists’ modernization agenda. Cultural modernization, as describedabove, was part of this program: the Soviet state would take each ethnic minorityby the hand and guide it through the process of acquiring the full cultural appa-ratus of modern nationhood – a native-language press, literature (with anindigenous writers’ union in charge of defining ideological and aesthetic stan-dards for it and facilitating its production), educational system (at least throughprimary or secondary school; Russian remained the language of higher educa-tion), etc. The creation of this cultural superstructure, in a reversal of theclassical Marxist paradigm, would help pave the way for the development of amodern, state-funded and controlled, socio-economic base and infrastructure.The process was to be facilitated and accelerated through a policy known askorenizatsiia (indigenization). Korenizatsiia sought to root each republic’s majorethnic group in the infrastructure of modernization by favoring its members forpromotion up the territory’s economic, administrative, and Communist Partyladders. Longstanding imperial patterns of unequal development, discrimination,and exploitation were to be reversed in this civilizing-mission-through-affirmative-action, as state-funded economic development and state-supported native-languageeducation provided the means for peasant peoples and even nomadic groups toleap-frog into the modern, socialist, internationalist age.

At least that was the idea in principle. In practice, not only did Soviet nation-alities policy present a far less pretty picture, it also contained a number offundamental paradoxes and contradictions.

Most prominent among these was the glaring gap between the formal recog-nition of each republic’s sovereignty and the reality of Moscow’s iron grip – adepth and uniformity of centralized control that far surpassed that exercised bythe Old Regime. This was true even during the 1920s, the era of the NewEconomic Policy (NEP), when small-scale private enterprise and private owner-ship of land was permitted. The brutality of the totalitarian state became evenmore pervasive and inescapable following Stalin’s abandonment of NEP in1928.

Moreover, no matter how much the Party sought to portray itself as interna-tionalist in both orientation and composition, there was no getting around thefact that ethnic Russians were disproportionately represented in the CommunistParty of the USSR, in the upper echelons of the Party apparatus, and in centralgovernment institutions, and that Russian continued to be promoted as thelingua franca of Soviet higher education and of the country’s political and tech-nocratic elites. The tendency toward cultural/linguistic Russification grew ratherthan diminished over time and was accompanied by ever more prevalent mani-festations of chauvinistic attitudes toward non-Russian – and especiallynon-Slavic – ethnic groups. This shift was accentuated by the Communist Party’stransition from a relatively small, self-selected group of committed revolution-aries to the ruling apparatus of the country, whose rapidly expanding ranks werefilled by career-minded people for whom the incantation of internationalistclichés represented a prerequisite for their ascent up the bureaucratic ladderrather than an expression of deeply held convictions. Joseph Stalin’s growing


power within the party apparatus rested in large measure on the support of thisnew cohort, and – his own ethnic Georgian background notwithstanding – heemployed thinly veiled language and actions to encourage Russians’ sense ofprimacy within the Soviet Union.

It was one of the ironies of the Soviet ethnofederal system that the Russianrepublic was the least distinctly and cohesively constituted of the federal units.On the one hand, the administrative overlap between its governing structure andthat of the central Soviet government was particularly extensive. On the otherhand, it was itself formally constituted as a federated republic, to accommodatethe unusually large multitude of autonomous ethnic regions that pockmarked itsterritory. The fact that little effort was made to cultivate a Russian ethnoterrito-rial consciousness distinct from Soviet identity served to reinforce Russians’tendency to identify the entire extent of the Soviet Union as their homeland – aform of national identity that often seemed to approximate a neo-imperialmentality. This perspective was further strengthened by the wide distribution ofethnic Russians across the territory of non-Russian republics.62

Conversely, Communist ethnofederalism did not automatically neutralizeautonomist impulses among the non-Russian nationalities. On the contrary, theperiod leading up to the conclusion and ratification of a Union treaty in1923–1924 was marked by strong tensions between Moscow and republicanleaders objecting to the ongoing abuse of authority by RSFSR officials andconcerned that the prospective constitution of the USSR lacked sufficient guar-antees against the continuation of this pattern of arrogance and intrusiveness onthe part of the Moscow authorities.

In the Ukrainian SSR, notably, Communist Party leader M. Skrypnikobjected strenuously to systematic violations of the Ukraine’s official sovereignty.A committed Bolshevik of long standing, he contended that this phenomenonwas but one manifestation of a pernicious pattern of renewed Russian chau-vinism that could undermine support for the revolution among the peoples ofthe Soviet Union. Likewise, in Georgia, whose independent Menshevik govern-ment had been overthrown by invading Bolshevik forces in 1921, the newlyinstalled Communist authorities soon found themselves at odds with the head ofthe Russian Commissariat of Nationality Affairs, Joseph Stalin – himself anethnic Georgian who promoted an unabashedly centralizing policy with strongRussian-nationalist overtones. However committed they themselves may havebeen to internationalist principles, the Georgian Communists found themselvesplaying the functional equivalent of nationalists as they strove to preserve thoseaspects of sovereignty guaranteed them by their 1921 treaty with the RSFSR butnegated by the intrusive machinations of Stalin and his henchmen. The lattersought to force Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia back into a Transcaucasianfederation that would enter the USSR as one republican unit, undercuttingGeorgia’s equality of status with other founding republics of the Soviet Union.Lenin himself strove at the last minute to intervene on behalf of the GeorgianParty leaders in a vain attempt to preserve some credible division of powerbetween the Russian-dominated Communist center and non-Russian


Communist periphery. However, he was soon incapacitated by a stroke andunable to prevent the Georgian leaders’ ouster and replacement by Stalinistloyalists who embraced the creation in December 1922 of a TranscaucasianFederated Soviet Socialist Republic. By the time the federation was dissolved andGeorgian republican sovereignty notionally restored in 1936, the local partyorganization had been systematically purged of all potential autonomistelements, and a new purge – part of the Stalinist terror unleashed throughoutthe Soviet Union – was under way.63

In the Ukrainian and Georgian cases, local Communist elites were trying tomaintain equality of status for their republics by working within the formal ideo-logical and constitutional system, attempting to make the spirit of Soviet policyconform to the letter of the law. But there was also a more systematic, ideologicallydistinctive challenge to the Soviet regime’s centralism-in-the-name-of-internationalism.This was Sultan Galiev’s National Bolshevism. A Volga Tatar from Kazan whohad served as a Russian-language teacher in the Caucasus, had gone on towork for the All-Russian Muslim Congress of 1917 (see Chapter 4), and hadjoined the Bolshevik Party around the time of the November Revolution,Mirza Sultan Galiev was a left-wing, ideological heir to the jadid movement ofthe pre-war period (see Chapter 3). As in the case of the jadids, his frame ofreference encompassed all the Muslims of the former Russian empire, inwhose united action there would be more strength and more universal signifi-cance than in the ethnic particularism that had fragmented Russia’s Muslimsin 1917–1918 and that the Soviet regime was institutionalizing through itsethnofederal system.

Sultan Galiev took as his point of departure the premise (shared by Lenin)that the Russian empire’s Muslims – particularly those of Central Asia – hadbeen the victims of systematic economic exploitation on the part of Russiancolonists, merchants, and manufacturers, who had enjoyed the backing andencouragement of the Russian government. His radically revisionist conclusionwas that the Muslim population as a whole, therefore, constituted a proletariannation. Internal class distinctions among the Muslims paled by comparison withthe stark contrast between their historical role as the exploited and the Russians’role as the exploiters. The attainment of Muslim national self-determination (inthe form of far-reaching, substantive autonomy for a unified Republic of Turanthat would encompass all the Soviet Union’s major Muslim populations) wouldthus constitute a revolutionary step forward according to Sultan Galiev. Indeed,adapting Lenin’s justification for his socio-economically premature socialist revo-lution in Russia, Sultan Galiev argued that the national liberation of the SovietUnion’s Muslim-populated regions would serve as the revolutionary spark thatwould set off a global revolution of oppressed, proletarian nations and theconsequent collapse of imperialism, and hence capitalism. This was, in a sense, adoctrine of Soviet–Muslim chosenness or exceptionalism, a nationalist ideologycouched in terms of universalistic, socialist values. This ideological heresy led toSultan Galiev’s purge from the party in 1923 and his subsequent arrest and


disappearance in 1928, followed by the systematic liquidation of all MuslimCommunists suspected of harboring National Communist inclinations.64

The suppression of Sultan Galievism marked the end of any organized orideologically articulate form of neo-pan-Islamic nationalism in the Soviet Union.Throughout the USSR, the official cultivation of ethno-cultural particularismcontinued to serve as an instrument of Communist indoctrination and as a figleaf of tolerance and pluralism that ill-concealed the brutal socio-economic andpolitical upheavals and mass terror of the years following Stalin’s abandonmentof the NEP in 1928. Indeed, there was a strong element of divide-and-rulestrategy and of a sort of ethnographic cultural imperialism in Soviet nationalitiespolicy. The drawing of political, linguistic, and institutional boundaries amongethnic groups was often arbitrary and seemed designed to make the objects ofthis policy dependent on the Soviet state for their very identity. This appears tohave been the case, for instance, in Turkestan, which was reconfigured into fiveSoviet republics (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kirghizistan, Kazakhstan, andTajikistan) and numerous autonomous sub-regions over the course of1924–1936. This novel political geography was based on ethnographic researchby Soviet academicians who imposed ethnic labels on peoples whose cultural andhistorical heritages were so diverse, complex, overlapping, and intertwined as todefy simple categorization by any truly objective standard. (By the same token,the integration of such populations into a monolithic Turkestan would have beenat least as contrived and arbitrary a nation-building project.) Each republic’seducational system then set about the task of propagating a standardized andhomogenized “national” language and an official historical myth that linked therecently created entity to an ancient state or ethnic group. (Thus, the Tajiks weredeclared to be descendants of the Sogdians.)65

While this approach may have served to ward off the coalescence of pan-nationalist or interethnic resistance movements, it did not automatically lead tothe consolidation of a purely class- and ideology-based Soviet identity either.The political geography of ethnofederalism continued to serve as a frame ofreference for collective identity, particularly because it was reinforced by theother aspects of Soviet nationalities policy. The korenizatsiia policy of the 1920shad given members of each republic’s majority group a very concrete, materialstake in the preservation of their identity, which served as a springboard forupward social mobility. That ethnic majorities and minorities were formallydistinguished from one another was itself a function of another paradoxicalfeature of the system: territorial identity was offset by “passport nationality.”66

The latter term refers to the fact that the internal passports issued from 1932 onidentified every Soviet citizen as a member of a particular ethnic group. Personalethnic identity was determined by parentage, not by place of birth.67 By thuscombining the principles of territorial and extraterritorial or personal identity,while pursuing policies of affirmative action for the eponymous group of eachrepublic except the RSFSR, and at the same time giving preferential treatmentto ethnic Russians when it came to staffing certain key administrative andCommunist Party positions throughout the Soviet Union, the regime further


institutionalized barriers and resentments among intermingled nationalities.Korenizatsiia was abandoned as an official policy in the 1930s, but aspects of itwere subsequently revived. The reification of distinctions among ethnic groupscontinued to be sustained by the dual-tiered, territorial and extraterritorialframeworks of identity, as well as by Stalin’s intermittent use of ethnicity as acategory for the classification – and collective punishment – of entire groups ofpeople as foes of the regime.68

Finally, the Soviet assumption that national culture, language, and folklorecould be freely manipulated to serve the goal of ideological homogenization wasalso questionable. Crushing blows certainly were struck at any expression ofidentity that did not conform to the officially designated mold. And yet, even thetightly constrained cultures of official identity were not completely neutral mediafor the transmission of the official line. The medium did affect the message.

The case of Jewish culture can serve as an illuminating example. Designatingthe Jews a nationality like any other (notwithstanding their lack of a territorialbase),69, the Soviets virtually eliminated Jewish religious education and severelylimited public worship, attacked Hebrew as the language of religion and ofZionism, and promoted Yiddish as the official language of the Jewish toilingmasses. The Jewish sections (generally referred to in the singular as the Yevsektsiia)of the Russian Communist Party, which were staffed by Jewish cadres andcharged with overseeing cultural policy and propaganda among the territoriallydiffuse Jewish population, gained a notorious reputation in the 1920s as zealousenforcers of the regime’s anti-religious and anti-Hebraic policies.70

Yet even in the context of this rigorously enforced cultural overhaul, in whichtraditional communal, religious, and educational institutions were destroyed andliturgical forms stripped of their content and transformed into vehicles for thepropagation of Communist propaganda, elements of an autonomous Jewishidentity continued to manifest themselves.71 Traditional forms could not bevoided of their content quite as easily as Soviet social engineers imagined. Forinstance, recent research by Jeff Veidlinger has shown that many plays producedby Moscow’s Yiddish Theater from the 1920s through 1940s were marked bytension between their overt Marxist-Leninist message and sentimental themesthat crept in between the lines. Some plays that pilloried pre-revolutionary shtetl(Jewish small town) society for its social inequalities and religious obscurantismnonetheless conveyed a sense of nostalgia for the lost world they were repudi-ating. Indeed, a number of these scripts were Marxist adaptations of classicssuch as the works of Sholom Aleichem (Solomon Rabinovitz, 1859–1916), theYiddish writer whose fondly sardonic depictions of shtetl life were also to serve asthe basis for Broadway’s and Hollywood’s ode to the Jewish past, Fiddler on theRoof. Original scripts could also contain such ambiguities, as in the case of oneplay that turned the story of Bar Kochba’s second-century AD anti-Roman revoltinto a parable about class conflict, yet in so doing also conveyed an unmistakablesense of nationalist pride (perhaps even with Zionist overtones) in the heroicdeeds of Jewish freedom fighters.72

As in the case of the Germans’ much more limited wartime experiment in the


manipulation of East European ethno-cultural identities (see Chapter 5), theSoviet attempt to shape ethnicity into an instrument of imperial or supranationalcontrol was ambiguous in its results. The Soviet authorities themselves vacillatedin their approach, reverting to overt Russification policies in some areas duringthe 1930s, officially abandoning korenizatsiia, integrating many small autonomousdistricts into the larger SSRs, deporting entire ethnic groups suspected of pro-German sympathies during the Second World War from the Caucasus toCentral Asia, shutting down Yiddish theaters and executing the Soviet Union’sleading Yiddish writers in 1952, then reverting to a toned-down version ofkorenizatsiia as part of the overall de-Stalinization process of the mid-to-late1950s.

Yet through it all, the basic institutional and juridical structures of ethnofed-eralism – the territorial republic and the designation of personal nationality inidentity documents – remained in place (and were copied or adapted, in turn, byCommunist Yugoslavia and the People’s Republic of China). Even as the indus-trialization of the USSR’s economy, the collectivization of agriculture, and theuniformity of the educational curriculum created greater similarity in materialconditions and socio-economic structures among various peoples, the impulse toresist complete homogenization and loss of identity may have grown strongeramong some.73 The fading of the ideological zeal of the Soviet Union’s earlyyears increased the attractiveness of national culture as a frame of reference forpersonal and collective identity. Amidst the final decline of Soviet Communismin the late 1980s through 1991, the legacy of Lenin’s ethnofederalism stoodready to hand as the only institutional alternative to the now discredited prin-ciple of proletarian internationalism. The dialectic of Leninist nationalitiespolicy backfired, as the very structures designed to defuse separatist impulses andtranscend interethnic jealousies and resentments now formed the fault linesalong which the Soviet state disintegrated into independent national republics.

Reconfiguring the Boundaries of Identity in the MiddleEast

The Turkish Settlement and the Kemalist State

Unlike the Romanov and Habsburg empires, the Ottoman state did not collapsein 1917 or 1918. It simply lost more and more of its territory to the advancingBritish-commanded armies in the Arab Middle East. The impending capitula-tion of its German and Austro-Hungarian allies and the steady advance ofBritish forces in the Middle East in the fall of 1918 made the inevitability ofOttoman defeat apparent. As the discredited CUP leadership fled the country toavoid arrest by the Allied powers on war crimes charges stemming from theArmenian massacres of 1915, the Sultan’s newly appointed government signedthe Armistice of Mudros on 30 October 1918, opening the country to occupa-tion by Allied forces.74


Map 5 Partition of the Ottoman Empire, 1920Source: Sydney N. Fisher and William Ochsenwald, The Middle East: A History, Fourth Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990). Reproduced with permission of the McGraw-Hill companies.

The peace settlement that followed – the Treaty of Sèvres (10 August 1920) –was dictated by the victorious Allied powers. It ratified the partition of the ArabMiddle East by the British and French, who were to administer their respectiveterritories under mandates from the League of Nations. Anatolia itself was to becarved up into Greek-, Italian-, and French-administered zones, an independentArmenia, an autonomous or independent Kurdistan, and a weak and vulnerableOttoman rump state to be left under the control of the Sultan.75

The Turkish nationalist societies and secret military formations that had beencreated by the CUP to mobilize public support for the war effort and to strike atethnic groups perceived as enemies (see Chapter 4) were now called upon byformer CUP member and army officer Mustafa Kemal to sustain a resistanceeffort against the occupying and invading powers and the Sultan who was collab-orating with them. Based in central and eastern Anatolia, Mustafa Kemal’smovement rejected the authority of the Sultan, established a parliamentary body(the Grand National Assembly) in Ankara, and, over the course of 1919–1922,succeeded – with the help of military supplies and financial aid from the SovietUnion, which saw in Kemal a useful counter to Western imperialism – indefeating a series of military adversaries. His forces triumphed over a Greekarmy attempting to expand Greece’s occupation zone. He forced the French intoa negotiated withdrawal from Cilicia (on the Syrian border). NortheasternAnatolia, scene of the Armenian massacres of 1915, had, with the Westernpowers’ blessing, been occupied by the independent Armenian republic in early1919. It was retaken by Kemal in September–October 1920 in a military victorythat pushed the Armenian government into the over-protective arms of theRussian Communists. Moscow duly proceeded to sign away on its behalf theterritories it had disputed with the Turks.76 Having gained control of Istanbuland abolished the Sultanate by late 1922, Kemal’s government capped itstriumph by scrapping the humiliating Treaty of Sèvres and negotiating theTreaty of Lausanne (24 July 1923), which established Turkey’s full sovereignty,territorial integrity, and international legitimacy.77

Thus, the one state that emerged fully independent from the debris of theformer Ottoman empire was based on the Turkish core of that empire. Criticalto this development was the fact that a new ruling elite had emerged in theempire during the last years of its existence. The Young Turks had been tornbetween their efforts to hold the multiethnic empire together on the one hand,and their increasing commitment to Turkish nationalism on the other. Thedefeat of the Ottoman empire resolved the tension between the conflicting inter-ests and agendas that had informed the policies of the CUP regime. Theconsolidation of Bolshevik control over Central Asia put an end to the pan-Turkist dream, while the Anglo-French occupation of the Arab lands freedTurkish nationalists of the need to clothe their agenda in pan-Islamic garb.Although the CUP as such was discredited and disbanded in the aftermath ofthe military defeat, Musafa Kemal’s nationalist movement is now widely recog-nized by historians78 as in many ways a direct heir to the Young Turks. MustafaKemal (who was later renamed Kemal Atatürk [Great Turk]) retained or


adapted many of the former regime’s ideological perspectives and mobilizationtechniques, with none other than Ziya Gökalp (see Chapter 3) becoming chiefexponent of the official line.

The defeat of the Greeks provided an occasion for consolidating the ethni-cally Turkish base of the new nation-state, with 1.1 million Greeks fleeing fromwestern Asia Minor to Greece while 380,000 Turks moved in the opposite direc-tion in a population transfer sanctioned by international treaty and endorsed bythe Western powers. (Religious affiliation was used as the marker of ethnic iden-tity in this population transfer, with thousands of Turkish-speaking adherents ofEastern Orthodoxy finding themselves deported to Greece, and vice versa.) TheArmenian population had already been drastically reduced by the massacres andexpulsions of 1915, with additional tens of thousands of Armenians fleeing fromCilicia into Lebanon and elsewhere following French withdrawal from thatprovince in 1921. The Kurds, a largely peasant population with no religious,cultural, or commercial ties to the West and which did not compete economi-cally with the rising Turkish urban elites, were deemed suitable for assimilationinto Turkish culture and identity. Any attempt on their part to resist the authorityof the Turkish nation-state or to assert their collective self-interest as a distinctnationality was brutally crushed.79

While ethnic groups that had traditionally turned to the Western powers forprotection were treated as alien elements to be eliminated from the Turkish bodypolitic, Turkish identity was itself defined in strictly secular, Western-orientedterms. Turkey was declared a republic in October 1923, the vestigial spiritualauthority of the caliphate was abolished in 1924, and Mustafa Kemal’s dictato-rial state used its arbitrary powers to impose its notion of modern, secularnational identity from above over the course of the 1920s by criminalizing thewearing of the fez (itself introduced in the early nineteenth century as part of anew look associated with the Tanzimat reform movement), encouraging theadoption of Western-style dress, fully secularizing family law (the last legaldomain to have escaped complete secularization under earlier regimes),expanding the legal rights of women, adopting the Latin alphabet, and trying to“purify” the Turkish language by purging it of much of its Arabic and Persianvocabulary. This can be seen as an attempt to create an all-embracing civicconsciousness (propagated more successfully among urban middle classes thanamong the peasantry) based on a synthesis of Western civilization and Turkishculture. But Turkish civic nationalism was built on a legacy of genocide andethnic cleansing and propagated by a dictatorial regime with little patience forthe niceties of pluralistic politics.80

The concerted use of state institutions to forge a Turkish national conscious-ness and to modernize the country’s socio-cultural and economic institutionsseemed relatively successful at the time, and served as a powerful model thatother budding nation-states in formerly Ottoman territories sought to emulate.81

Unlike Turkey, however, the Arab world remained overshadowed by Europeanimperial power and divided by profound internal differences over the meaningand geopolitical parameters of Arab nationalism.


European Imperialism as Framework for the Genesis ofMiddle Eastern Nation-States

In the lands to the south of Turkey, the British and French gradually settleddifferences arising from Britain’s drive to revise their 1916 spheres of influenceagreement. At the 1920 San Remo Conference, they settled on British control ofMesopotamia (Iraq) and Palestine (with the territory east of the river Jordanmarked off by the British in 1921–1922 to form a separate entity calledTransjordan) and French control of Syria and Lebanon. League of Nationsmandates (approved in 1922) were to form the international legal framework forthis arrangement.82 The rationale for the mandates rather awkwardly weddedWilsonian principle with colonial practice. The inhabitants of the Arab landswere deemed politically immature – not yet quite capable of governing them-selves. They were accordingly to be placed under the benevolent tutelage of theBritish and French, who were to guide them toward eventual independence.While the mandatory authorities were required to report periodically to theLeague on the progress of their assignments, no final due date was assigned forthe handover of power to indigenous authorities. The mandates were, in fact, aconvenient instrument for the imperial policies of the British and French, whohad agreed on the postwar partition of the region into spheres of influence intheir 1916 Sykes–Picot agreement, and who gained control of these territoriesthrough military conquest followed by the suppression of indigenous resistancein Iraq and Syria.

Yet to suggest that Anglo-French policy was shaped by imperial interests andvalues is not to say that the institutional form of the mandates had no impact ontheir approach to governance,83 nor is it to say that this period did not mark awatershed in the development of Middle Eastern nationalisms – it did. The veryarbitrariness of the borders dividing one mandatory regime from another had asignificant impact on the development of states and identities in the region, asdid British and French experimentation with variations on the theme of linkingtheir imperial overlordship to local nationalism.

In the case of Palestine, Britain’s claim to the territory was strongly linked toits endorsement of the Zionist movement’s aspiration to establish in Palestine a“national home for the Jewish people,” as the November 1917 BalfourDeclaration had cautiously phrased it.84 The League of Nations mandate forPalestine constituted the international legal framework for this nation-buildingproject. It incorporated the language of the Balfour Declaration and obliged theBritish to facilitate Jewish immigration and to cooperate with a Jewish Agency inthe settlement and development of the land, while protecting the rights of theterritory’s Arab population.85

To the north, the French established themselves in Lebanon in 1919, then –following the withdrawal in 1919 of British occupation forces from Syria and theSan Remo agreement of April 1920 – employed military force in 1920 to makegood their claim to Syria, where Faisal, son of Hussein, had been declared kingin a final act of nationalist defiance. Faisal’s army was defeated at the Battle ofMaisalun in July and the king himself fled into exile, clearing the way for the


establishment of French mandatory rule. The French exercised their authority inLebanon and Syria in a highly intrusive manner, experimenting with the coopta-tion of various coalitions of local notables into puppet governments, whileultimate authority remained in the hands of the French high commissioners.86

By contrast, the British were inclined to move fairly rapidly toward thegranting of more substantive self-government or even formal independence inthe Middle Eastern lands under their control – other than Palestine, where thegrowing conflict between Jews and Arabs begged the question of who wouldexercise power in an autonomous government. In Transjordan (corresponding totoday’s kingdom of Jordan), Faisal’s brother Abdullah was installed as Emirunder the supervision of a British High Commissioner. In Iraq, following thesuppression of an anti-British popular uprising led by traditional notables in1920, Faisal was established as king in 1921 in compensation for his loss of Syriaand as a way of creating a mediating system between British hegemony and theindigenous population. Iraq was awarded formal independence in 1932 withinthe framework of a 1930 treaty that left Britain with a preponderance of mili-tary, economic, and political power in the country. In 1936, a similararrangement was negotiated in Egypt, which had been under British rule since1882.

By creating a façade of Arab self-government and by wrapping their hege-mony in Transjordan and Iraq in the mantle of the Hashemite dynasty, theBritish hoped to build on their wartime policy of using Arab nationalism as thehandmaiden of their imperial ambitions. Yet, however self-interested theirmotives and manipulative their methods, in undertaking these policies they putin place some of the basic structures within which Arab political identity was totake shape. Their preferred method of indirect rule and their affiliation with thefamily that had led the Arab Revolt also brought pressure for reform to bearupon the French, whose rule in Syria and Lebanon appeared more oppressiveand less legitimate by contrast. Under the left-of-center Popular Front govern-ment of 1936, France attempted to imitate the British model by negotiating whatturned out to be a short-lived agreement with Arab nationalists in Syria thatseemed to put that country on the road to quasi-independence under the Frenchimperial canopy.

Unlike their East Central European counterparts, then, the Arabs did notachieve full-fledged national independence in the immediate aftermath of thewar. Nonetheless, the conceptual and institutional frameworks of independentstates were established under the auspices of the imperial powers. To be sure,Britain and France used these state apparatuses as instruments of economic,political, and military control over the Middle East. Yet by the same token, thenewly formed states became the primary vessels within which Arab (and, inPalestine, also Jewish) nationalism took root as a hegemonic political ideologyand assumed some of its distinctive typological forms. At the same time, theintrusive presence of the non-Islamic European authorities had the potential tostimulate the growth of nationalism among the general population in a way andon a scale that Ottoman rule never did. Indeed, it opened the door to propagan-


dist experiments by embryonic populist organizations that linked familiar Islamicimagery and symbols to resentment of the foreigner in nationalist synthesesmore readily intelligible to a mass audience than the essentially secular ideologyof the Arab nationalist elites.87

All this is to suggest that the roll-back of the Ottoman empire constituted amore significant turning point in the development of the region’s nation-statesthan did the disintegration of European control after the Second World War,and that post-First World War developments here therefore merit inclusion inthis chapter despite the anomalous factor of the French and British imperialpresence.

Statehood vs. Nationhood in the Arab World

The geopolitical transformation of the Middle East shaped the evolution ofidentities in various ways and at a number of levels. To begin with, the disap-pearance of the overarching Ottoman framework presided over by asultan/caliph meant that the notion of the umma – the unbounded socio-religiouscommunity of Muslim faithful – no longer corresponded to any existing politicalstructure. Arab intellectual and social elites were left casting about for alternativeframes of reference.

The most attractive idea was that of Arab nationalism, whose adherents nolonger had to restrict their activities to secret societies now that the Turks haddeparted from the scene.88 Jemal Pasha’s harsh wartime policies had succeededin disrupting the organizational structure of the secret societies while lendingcredibility to their claim that the Arabs as a people were being oppressed by theTurks. The apparent triumph of the Arab forces upon their entry into Damascusin October 1918 rapidly assumed a mythical aura, rendered all the morepoignant and evocative by the subsequent ouster of Faisal by the French. Theassumption of the Transjordanian and Iraqi thrones by the Hashemite brothersensured that the dream of uniting the Arabs89 under one dynasty wouldcontinue to appear a concrete possibility, with the potential leaders of such amovement already in positions of power in self-governing political entities. Bythe same token, pan-Arabism held particular appeal as a modern, secular substi-tute for the umma (and also as a substitute for the discredited idea ofOttomanism, which itself had served as a secular, socially integrative alternativeto the umma – see Chapter 3) precisely because it transcended the arbitrary linesof division the Western powers had imposed on the region.

Yet here lay the rub. The advocates of Arab political unification tended tolook to the Hashemite rulers, or at least to the state apparatuses over which theypresided, as the instruments for achieving their objectives. But which ruler, whichgovernment, which army was to take the lead in this enterprise? The fact wasthat, arbitrary though it might have been, the Anglo-French partition of theMiddle East had created a paradoxical situation in which a multiplicity of polit-ical elites felt compelled at least to pay lip service to the goal of one day


eliminating the frontiers that divided them, while competing with one anotherfor pride of place in this endeavor.

Indeed, the steady stream of rhetoric about the destiny of the Arab nationwas belied by the rapid crystallization of state-centered political identities amongthe elites of Syria, Iraq, and the Arabs of Palestine. Even during Syria’s briefheyday of independence in 1918–1920, clear tensions between pan-Arab andregionalist impulses had manifested themselves. Faisal found himself playing adelicate balancing act among local notables, whose rapid rhetorical shift fromOttomanism to Arabism ill-concealed their unchanged preoccupation withsecuring and preserving their administrative offices, patronage networks, andpolitical influence under whatever regime happened to be in power, and themotley crew of Sharifian officers and members of the nationalist secret societieswho looked upon Faisal’s regime as a springboard for the fulfillment of pan-Arabaspirations. This latter group, which won a majority of seats to the SyrianCongress in elections held in 1919, was itself divided among the mostly Syrianmembers of al-Fatat, the Iraqi officers of al-‘Ahd (including both formerSharifians and those who had continued to serve in the Ottoman army until theend of the war), and a small but vocal contingent of Palestinian Arabs thatjoined the assembly (now renamed the General Syrian Congress) in March 1920.The last group was frustrated by its inability to win Faisal’s regime over to amore actively anti-Zionist position (indeed, Faisal had concluded a tentativemodus vivendi with Chaim Weizmann in January 1919, in the hope of gainingZionist and British support against the French),90 while the Iraqi and SyrianArab nationalist groupings competed with one another for political influenceover the regime. Faisal’s effort to reach a compromise arrangement with theFrench had won the support of Syrian notables, but provoked a backlash fromthe committed nationalists who dominated the General Syrian Congress. Backedby widespread public unrest (possibly the first clear manifestation of nationalistsentiment – itself more Syrian-centered than pan-Arab in outlook – among thegeneral populace),91 the Congress essentially forced Faisal to accept the title ofKing of an independent Syria on 8 March 1920 as a gesture of defiance towardthe French. The April 1920 San Remo Conference, French military invasion andvictory at the Battle of Maisalun in July, and Faisal’s flight into exile followed inshort order.92

With the crushing of Syrian independence, Damascus lost its role as a locusof common effort and internecine struggle among Arab nationalists fromthroughout the region. The Iraqi contingent eventually followed Faisal toBaghdad, the Syrian Arab nationalists lay low or withdrew into British manda-tory territories where they continued to focus their attention on developmentsback home (most were sooner or later amnestied by the French as part of inter-mittent efforts at political accommodation), and the Palestinian Arab activistsreturned to Palestine. Committed as many of them remained to the dream ofArab unification, their only way of remaining politically active was to operatewithin the frameworks of their respective mandatory regimes.93

The Palestinian Arab nationalists are a case in point. Like their Syrian coun-


terparts, many of them hailed from the class of urban notables that had domi-nated local politics and patronage networks for the last half century or so ofOttoman rule, but were distinguished by characteristics such as their relativeyouth and their exclusion (due partly to the reforms of the Young Turks) fromoffices and perquisites that historical precedent had led them to regard as theirsby right (see Chapter 3). During 1918–1920, a number of these activists hadparticipated in the General Syrian Congress, while those remaining in Palestinehad looked to Damascus for inspiration and leadership. Many belonged to aPalestine-based sister organization of al-Fatat, and these elements had domi-nated the first Palestinian Arab Congress of January–February 1919, which hadpassed resolutions in favor of the creation of a Greater Syria encompassingPalestine. The term Palestine, after all, had until recently referred to a vaguelydefined geographical area that had religious or socio-cultural significance, butthat did not correspond to any administrative unit under the Ottomans (anymore than Syria did). Faisal’s government in Damascus seemed like the obviouscandidate to lead all the Arabs of the region to independence.

With the fall of Faisal’s regime, the young nationalist elite in Palestine was leftwith little choice but to operate within the confines of mandatory Palestine,where the older generation of notables had already begun to cultivate the notionof Palestinian patriotism as a vehicle for the assertion of their local interests vis-à-vis the British authorities and in the face of the Zionist challenge. The youngergeneration’s shift of focus to the mandatory arena was reflected in the resolutionsof the Third Palestinian Arab Congress of December 1920, which abandonedall talk of a Greater Syria in favor of resolutions calling for home-rule for theArabs of Palestine.94

The rapid development of the Zionist enterprise under the aegis of theBritish mandate played a critical role in catalyzing the development of a distinc-tive Palestinian Arab national consciousness during the interwar period.Opposition to early Zionist settlement had already been expressed vociferously inthe local press and by Arab parliamentary representatives during the last decadeof Ottoman rule, but it was in the post-Ottoman, post-Maisalun framework, thatthis opposition began clearly to take the form of a distinctive Palestinian Arabnationalism that responded to the Zionist claim to the territory as a Jewishhomeland by conceiving of the same territory as the collective birthright of itsArab population. The Zionist program of land acquisition, which concentratedon the purchase of individual Arab estates from absentee landlords, acceleratedthe development of a nationalist consciousness among both the Palestinian Arabelites and the peasantry, specifically the tenant farmers and sharecroppers whoseconcern over the prospect of eviction from their individual plots could readily belinked to a broader sense of nationalist territoriality. The Zionists designated theland they purchased as inalienable property owned by the Jewish National Fundin the name of the Jewish people; this land could be leased to Jewish agriculturalsettlements, but it could never be sold. Palestinian Arab leaders responded byemphasizing the centrality of Arab land tenure to the preservation of theirhomeland’s integrity. To sell an individual farm to the Zionists was construed as


handing over a piece of the motherland to the enemy. Within Palestine, it wasthe very absence of a defined frontier between the rival nationalist movementsthat fueled the struggle between them and that turned every instance of localfriction (clashes between neighboring Jewish and Arab settlements, tensions overArab claims to pasturing rights on lands purchased by the Jewish National Fund,etc.) into an incident burdened with nationalist implications.95

As the Palestinian case suggests, while the Battle of Maisalun put an end tothe already fragile Damascene framework for pan-Arab cooperation, it led to thecoalescence of more cohesive political elites within the frameworks of individualmandatory states. Mandatory borders and sectarian differences shaped distinctcommunities of political identity, many of which employed the rhetoric of Arabnationalism in the service of their rival interests.96

Sectarianism and Ethno-Regional Politics in the Frameworkof Arab Nationalism

Indeed, because its aspirations were so disconnected from the existing configura-tion of political boundaries in the post-Ottoman Middle East, and were in factso ill-defined geographically and culturally, Arab nationalism was an extremelymalleable ideology, which lent itself to multiple interpretations and applications.It was seized upon by a wide variety of regional interests and sectarian commu-nities throughout the Middle East, be it as a source of legitimation for their ownparticular interests, as an ideological basis for coalition building among groupswith shared interests, or, by the same token, as the encapsulation of existentialdanger for minority groups that feared the prospect of violence or repressioncommitted in its name and who responded by cultivating their own sense ofethnonational distinctiveness.

The specific orientation of any given sectarian or ethno-regional97 commu-nity toward Arab nationalism – and toward the Sunni Muslim elites thatdominated nationalist regimes and organizations – was influenced by a host offactors and was subject to change over time. Indeed, many communities wereinternally divided over the question. Policies pursued by the mandatory authori-ties played an influential role in shaping such alignments. This is particularlystriking in the case of the French-controlled territories.

For decades if not centuries prior to the First World War, France had soughtto play the role of protector of Catholic communities in the Middle East. It hadestablished a particularly close cultural and political bond with the Maronites ofMount Lebanon – members of a Nestorian Church that recognized the spiritualauthority of the Pope. France had played a leading role in the European militaryand diplomatic intervention that had ended massacres of Maronites by theirDruze98 neighbors in 1860. In the wake of this crisis, the autonomy traditionallyenjoyed by this region was reaffirmed and formalized in an international treaty,which created the Mutasarrifate (district) of Mount Lebanon as a territory with a60 per cent Maronite majority, enjoying special privileges and a measure of self-rule under an Ottoman-appointed, Christian governor.99


Their experience of Jemal Pasha’s wartime political repression and of thedevastating wartime famine that killed off nearly a fifth of Mount Lebanon’spopulation left the Maronites’ communal and clerical leaders all the more loathto accept Muslim political dominion and all the more eager to turn to Frenchsupport in restoring and expanding the juridical and territorial scope of theirautonomy. Although some Maronite leaders sought to reach an understandingwith Faisal in Damascus, the influential Church authorities remained steadfastlyopposed to the integration of Mount Lebanon into an Arab state. For themajority of Maronites, Arab nationalism represented the latest incarnation ofthe age-old Muslim threat. What they demanded instead was the creation of anindependent Maronite state with borders extending well beyond MountLebanon to encompass territories claimed on historic and economic grounds.The combination of local pressure from the Maronite patriarch, lobbying inFrance by émigrés, and the breakdown in French relations with Faisal, helpedconvince the French authorities to grant the Maronites their wish through thetransfer of territories that had historically been part of the Ottoman province ofDamascus.

The resultant state of Greater Lebanon (declared in September 1920), whichremained under the authority of the French high commissioner for Syria andLebanon but was granted a republican constitution in 1926, encapsulated all thepossible dilemmas and contradictions that the creation of a nation-state couldentail. The new territories added on to Mount Lebanon contained a majorityMuslim population, albeit divided between Sunnis and Shi‘ites. Christianscomprised a bare majority of the new state’s population, with the Maronitesthemselves constituting no more than 32 per cent – a proportion that declinedprogressively over time due to differential birth rates. Members of the GreekOrthodox, Greek Catholic, Armenian, and various other churches did notparticularly care to play a subordinate role in a Maronite-dominated state. Thefact that the Maronites’ mainstream leadership defined the Maronites as non-Arabs100 created all the stronger an incentive for their disgruntled Muslimneighbors to demand reunification with Syria in the name of Arab nationalism.As early as 1919–1920, territories in and around Mount Lebanon under Frenchoccupation had been the scene of attacks against the French as well as theirMaronite allies by armed bands from Druze, Sunni, and Shi‘ite communities –attacks led or incited from within those communities by advocates of Arabnationalism with close ties to Faisal’s regime. To be sure, inter-communalviolence was nothing new to this region, but Arab nationalism and MaroniteLebanese nationalism formed modern legitimizing frameworks for its perpetua-tion, as well as for its eventual transposition from the domain of traditionalmountain communities to ostensibly cosmopolitan commercial centers such asBeirut.

In an effort to accommodate the interests of the various communities in thenew state, the French supported the drafting of a constitution that enshrined andextended a principle that had existed in embryonic form in the OttomanMutasarrifate – the allocation of all seats in the legislature to members of the


various sectarian communities according to a fixed formula based on censusfigures. While all adult residents of a given district, regardless of religious affilia-tion, took part in the election of its multiconfessional slate of representatives tothe Chamber of Deputies, this system nonetheless reinforced the notion that thecountry’s political leaders were answerable first and foremost to their respectivereligious communities. Intended as a method of reconciling the various non-Maronite groups with their incorporation into Greater Lebanon, this systemmay have helped ease tensions, but it also served to reinforce and institutionalizethe vertical segmentation of political consciousness along sectarian lines, as didthe informal understandings about the distribution of executive and ministerialpositions among the major religious communities.

Lebanon’s profound inter-communal differences were eventually paperedover in the 1943 British-supported101 National Pact, a binding oral agreement inwhich Maronite and Sunni leaders jointly signaled their break with France andassertion of full independence. The rhetorical framework for this alliance was astatement that described Lebanon as “a homeland with an Arab face seeking thebeneficial good from the culture of the West.”102 Yet this formula, suggestive ofa new civic identity rooted in a synthesis of Arab roots and Western values, wasbelied by the Pact’s reinforcement of the traditional political quota system, desig-nating which high offices were to be assigned to leaders of which communities.The brittleness of the system was underlined by the fact that 1932 was the lasttime (as of 2000) a census was taken in Lebanon; any renegotiation of the distri-bution of legislative seats and political offices in accordance with demographicchanges was a scenario so likely to lead to an impasse that it threatened thecontinued existence of the state.

In Syria, French incompetence and inconsistency actually contributed to theforging of intercommunal coalitions based on an Arab nationalist political plat-form. This was most striking in the case of the Druze of southwestern Syria (aregion known as Jebel Druze – the Mountain of the Druze). This largely peasantcommunity was still organized around a clan structure, yet some of its mostinfluential leaders had been educated in the urban centers of the Middle Eastand had been involved in Arab nationalist politics since before 1914. Themandatory authorities hoped to break the Druze link to Arab nationalism and topursue a divide-and-rule strategy by granting separate administrative status andlocal autonomy to Jebel Druze as well as to the Alawite103 territory in the north-west. But the inconsistency and arbitrariness of French policies helped provoke a1925 Druze rebellion that spread like wildfire throughout much of Syria.

The leaders of the revolt were those Druze figures with the closest links toArab nationalist organizations. They were quickly joined by Arab nationalistleaders from Damascus and other Syrian urban centers in what became a full-fledged Syrian revolt that spilled over from Jebel Druze into the very heart ofDamascus (as well as into Druze communities in Lebanon) and gained unprece-dented levels of mass support and involvement in many regions, both rural andurban.104 While the French succeeded in using military force to crush the revoltin 1926–1927, some of the more astute observers among them were left with the


inescapable conclusion that their divide-and-rule policies had backfired and thatFrance would have to reach a compromise with the Syrian Arab nationalist lead-ership on the model of what the British had done in Iraq. This led to theempowerment of the National Bloc (led by leading veterans of the political resis-tance to French rule) in 1936–1939 and an unsuccessful attempt at concluding aSyrian treaty of independence (which was signed by both sides but which theFrench parliament failed to ratify).105

The political practices of Faisal’s Iraqi regime highlighted both the possibili-ties and the limitations of using Arab nationalism as an ideological foundationfor state building. While attractive to a growing number of high-school anduniversity students as well as army officers, and increasingly acceptable as arhetorical frame of reference for the traditional Sunni notables, it was embracedless wholeheartedly by Shi‘ite leaders, whose followers represented a majority ofthe country’s Arab Muslims but constituted an economic and political under-class. Arab nationalism was appealing to them insofar as it gave them a claim toequality of status, but threatening if used – as it was – by the Sunni elites to legit-imize their own continued grip on power. As for the Kurds of northern Iraq,they shared the Sunni faith with the country’s elite, but Arabic was not theirnative tongue. For them, constructing Iraqi political identity on a foundation ofArab nationalism could not fail to be profoundly alienating, suggesting as it didthat they faced a choice between cultural assimilation or political marginaliza-tion. Their repeated uprisings against Baghdad’s rule were forcefullysuppressed.106

This handful of examples is illustrative of how extreme the divergence wasamong the political geography, ethnic and religious composition, and nationalistideologies of the post-Ottoman Middle East. While Arab nationalism served as aconvenient framework for building coalitions of Sunni Muslim elites within thebounds of the mandatory states, and in some cases (notably that of Druze clansin Syria) functioned as an ideological bridge between sectarian communities, itwas also fatally flawed in several respects: it threatened to undermine the legiti-macy of the very regimes or political elites that espoused it, insofar as theborders of their states cut across the notional Arab world. The consequentstruggle by each regime to present itself as the natural leader of pan-Arabismthreatened to pit one state against another in a never-ending game of rivalry andmutual subversion. The position of minority groups that were manifestly notArab, or whose sectarian identity was threatened by the prospect of assimilationinto a Sunni-dominated, Arab nationalist mainstream, was potentially even moremarginal and vulnerable than it had been under the Ottoman system, wherenon-Arab Sunnis (such as the Kurds) had been juridically equal members of theIslamic umma, and where many non-Muslim sectarian groups had had the subor-dinate, but juridically recognized and defined, status of millets.107

The enormous gap between the promise and reality of Arab nationalist poli-tics also engendered alienation and anger among a new generation ofnationalists, reared on the language of Arab unity and frustrated by the divisionof the Arab world, the continued domination of the Middle East by European


powers, and the lack of connection between elites and masses. Indeed, as thenext chapter will argue, the political culture of the elites in both the post-1918Middle East and East Central Europe was in many ways marked by continuitiesthat seemed to fly in the face of their own talk of change and renewal.

Conclusion

Throughout the vast expanses of the former empires, the drawing of newboundaries in the aftermath of war was a relatively rapid and often haphazardprocess that left an indelible mark on the political cultures of the new polities.Where formerly a wide range of nationalist visions – ranging from narrowlyethnic to pan-nationalist, from liberal to chauvinistic – had competed for atten-tion and popular support, there had now come into being, virtually overnight, anew, post-imperial political geography that closed off many potential paths ofdevelopment. The regimes that had helped create, or were forced to operatewithin the constraints of, the new political geography vigorously promoted theirown particular visions of national identity, obliging all communities – regional,religious, linguistic – that found themselves within the confines of the new statesto align themselves with or against the official model of identity.

In East Central Europe, the blurriness of ethnographic frontiers and the non-congruence between historic and ethnographic claims to territory was a recipefor conflict. The use of armed force to determine boundaries was irreconcilablewith any attempt to negotiate federative solutions or to introduce a credible,supraethnic, civic dimension to national identities. This reinforced the tendencyto define the basis for state legitimacy in narrowly ethnic terms and to polarizerelations between those nationalities associated with the official, state-promotedidentity and those ethnic groups left stranded within polities in which they bothfelt and were perceived as alien.

In the former Russian empire, the Soviet regime created a highly structured,cultural, territorial, and individually ascriptive framework for the definition ofethnic identities, with a view to shaping them according to a common SovietCommunist mold. Yet, no matter how manipulative and oppressive the regimemay have been in its use of ethnic identity as a medium for the propagation ofwhat might be termed a Soviet civic patriotism, the politics of nationality couldhardly fail to take on a life of its own in a system where it was so heavily institu-tionalized.

In the Arab countries, the connection between state legitimacy and nationalidentity was the most tenuous – and was all the more divisive a source ofcontention for that. The notion of the Arab nation was so broad and ill-definedthat, on the one hand, it could be used as a legitimizing principle by a widerange of communities and interests that were in fact sectarian or regional innature; on the other hand, no existing polity corresponded geographically toanyone’s conception of the Arab nation. The credibility of regimes that stakedtheir claim to power on their commitment to the Arab nationalist cause wasfurther undermined by the overshadowing presence of the European imperial


overseers – the very elements that had determined the borders of the individualstates in the first place.

In all three regions, the drawing of territorial and ethnographic boundarieswas a highly transformative process. Indeed, in some cases, one could go so faras to say that it did not so much reflect pre-existing ethnonational consciousnessas it shaped its development. In a system of sovereign states legitimized by theprinciple of national self-determination, there was little or no margin left forambiguous or multidimensional identities. Everyone had to be fitted into anethnonational box, by ascriptive means if necessary. Whether under the highlyformalized Soviet system of state-sponsored ethnic particularism, or in theframework of the East Central European and Balkan states’ dogged and coun-terproductive efforts to bring diverse popular identities into alignment withofficial nationalism (be it through forced assimilation, repression, or expulsion),or in the context of Middle Eastern leaders’ propagation of a pan-Arab identitythat transcended their own states’ frontiers, the politics of national identitybecame a high-stakes game from which none could afford to exclude themselves.Opportunities for education and upward social mobility, access to administrativeor political power, the securing of advantages vis-à-vis rival individuals orcommunities, sometimes even the very prospects for life or death – all wereconditioned as never before by one’s affiliation or lack thereof with the officialnational identity of one’s political unit.

Yet it would be misleading to end this book on such a note of radical change.In East Central Europe and the Middle East, strong elements of continuity inpolitical mentality and norms were clearly manifest, especially among thenationalist elites themselves. This introduced an element of inconsistency andself-contradiction that contributed to the fragility of the new nation-states, as weshall see in the next chapter.


The First World War precipitated an intense escalation of expectations ofchange among the diverse ethnic groups of the multinational empires. Therhetoric of national liberation appeared to constitute a common currency – anideological medium of exchange – among different social strata and politicalfactions within each nationality. This proved to be misleading, as profound socialand ideological divisions rapidly manifested themselves over precisely what sortsof changes national self-determination would in fact entail, and over how theterritorial, demographic, and cultural boundaries of nationhood were to bedetermined. Yet the transition from empire was not marked exclusively byvarying demands for change. There were also powerful elements of continuitythat soon manifested themselves in the newly established states – pre-existentinstitutional structures and traditional forms of political culture that beliednationalist themes of integration and transformation. This was most apparent inEast Central Europe and the Middle East (although it certainly was not absentfrom the Soviet political scene), and it is on these two regions that this schematicoverview of trends during the interwar period will focus.

The late Ernest Gellner linked the growth of nationalism to the bureaucrati-zation of state and society. Drawing on Max Weber’s writings, he argued that thestate cannot function effectively without the services of a disciplined body ofadministrators whose primary loyalty is to the state itself, rather than to anytribal or corporate structure outside the framework of the polity. Indeed, in acertain sense, the modern, Western political system seeks to transform the entirecitizenry into servants of (or participants in) the state. A government-run educa-tional system, Gellner argued, serves to standardize language and inculcatecommon values and identity among the entire population, so that people canfunction as interchangeable components of the vast bureaucratic apparatus andas standardized cogs in the integrated industrial economy.

Nationalism, in this formulation, is a by-product of the growth of the modernstate and the modern, industrial economy. That part of the population whosenative dialect and educational opportunities allow it easily to master the stan-dardized official language, achieves rapid social advancement and comes toregard the state as an expression of its own national identity. Those ethnicgroups that are disadvantaged because their native languages or dialects are very

7 Old Elites and RadicalChallengers in the NewNation-States, 1918–1939

different from the official state language, and whose opportunities for upwardsocial mobility are therefore compromised, can react in either of two ways: theycan rush to learn the hegemonic tongue and assimilate into the rapidlyadvancing ethno-cultural majority; alternatively, they can respond by developingseparatist movements aimed at creating independent nation-states within whichtheir own languages and cultures will predominate.

According to Gellner, the separatist scenario is the exceptional one. It is mostlikely to occur during the early phases of industrialization, when the gapsbetween haves and have-nots are at their greatest and the social tensions accom-panying modernization are most acute. He contended that, if the state managesto remain intact beyond the critical threshold of early industrialization, theongoing process of administrative and educational modernization is normallysuccessful at integrating and assimilating ethnic minorities (who come to realizethat they have more to gain by learning the dominant language and moving upthe existing socio-political ladder than by taking the risk of breaking off to formsmall and potentially vulnerable new states). Gellner’s main model for the sepa-ratist scenario was the experience of the multinational Habsburg empire, where,he argued, administrative-modernization and cultural-assimilation efforts,combined with the early onset of industrialization, served to heighten tensionsand aggravate inequalities between ethnic groups such as the Magyars andSlovaks. For him, the breakup of the Habsburg monarchy was the exception thatproved the rule: most contemporary nation-states themselves contain manyethnic minorities, yet tend ultimately to be successful at integrating them politi-cally and, to some extent at least, assimilating many of them culturally.1

Gellner’s paradigm brilliantly illuminates many aspects of the genesis ofmodern nationalism and explains many features of its early development. Yet hissuggestion that the nation-state is essentially a manifestation, and successfulpromoter, of the twin processes of modernization and socio-cultural integrationneeds to be balanced by a greater recognition of the pre-modern elements thatcontinue to play powerful roles in most twentieth-century states,2 particularly inthe case of that majority of contemporary polities that arose from imperialframeworks. In their sudden transition to independence, most so-called nation-states have carried over into their administration ways of thought and styles ofgovernance inherited from the ancien régime. Indeed, old elites often succeed inholding on to power by latching on to the rhetoric and imagery of nationalism.3

In its bewildering combination of integrative aspirations and alienating prac-tices, the nation-state’s administration can contribute actively to thefragmentation of society and the disenchantment of ethnic minorities. All toooften and all too quickly, coercive measures are resorted to as the only reliablemeans of maintaining the outward unity of the nation-state – and even the useof force has its limitations. Events in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the SovietUnion, Iraq, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and elsewhere since 1989 suggestthat Gellner’s guardedly optimistic assessment of the integrative potential of themodern state may need to be revised.

The Janus-faced nature of modern state bureaucracies was highlighted by

The New Nation-States, 1918–1939 199

Max Weber. Weber observed that democratization and bureaucratization gohand in hand, yet are also at odds with each other. The essence of democratiza-tion, in his broad use of the term, is the elimination of corporate privileges andjuridical distinctions among the various social strata – a leveling effect that ispremised on the equality of all citizens before the law (and that is an essentialfeature of the Gellnerian nation-state). Such a transformation can only becarried out if the personal authority of notables is replaced by the impersonal(hence impartial) authority of a professional, salaried bureaucracy. Yet a highlydisciplined cohort of trained administrators functioning at all levels of govern-ment may itself crystallize into a new socio-political elite of specializededucation and narrow, idiosyncratic values, an elite that stifles civic initiative andundermines the vitality of democratic institutions. A modern, impersonalbureaucracy is thus both indispensable to the functioning of mass democracy,and incompatible with its spirit. This dialectical relationship underlies much ofmodern political history according to Weber.4

Gellner fails to give adequate consideration to this paradox. More particu-larly, he underestimates the capacity of old elites to adapt to the politicalenvironment of freshly minted nation-states, seeking to influence or control theiradministrative and propagandist apparatuses even as they themselves absorb thenationalist ideologies that legitimize authority in the new polities. Many of thestates that gained independence in the wake of the First World War had perforceto borrow much of their personnel from the remains of the imperial politicaland bureaucratic elites. Many nationalist leaders themselves seemed incapable,once in power, of shedding attitudes and mentalities that accorded better withthe culture and mores of the old regimes than with the ideological frameworks ofthe new nation-states. The juxtaposition of elements of the old regimes’ politicalcultures with the democratic, populist rhetoric and imagery of nationalism wasjarring, and created long-term tensions within the new polities that arosebetween the Vistula and the Tigris after the First World War.5

One major line of division to which this phenomenon contributed was thatbetween the constituent nationalities of the new states. In addressing thisphenomenon, this chapter’s first section essentially continues with the topic ofethnic polarization raised in Chapter 6, looking at it from the perspective ofpolitical and administrative continuities.

The persistence of old patterns of elitism in the new polities also contributedto bitter and often violent rifts within dominant nationalities. This chapter’ssecond section compares such developments in Poland and the Middle East,where the irony of the situation was enhanced by the role of former under-ground nationalist activists and legionnaires in forming the new ruling circleswhose attitudes and practices often seemed so reminiscent of times gone by. Theglaring inconsistencies in the political praxis of the new nation-states’ foundingfathers contributed to the rise of an angry new generation of nationalist extrem-ists in the course of the interwar years.

200 The New Nation-States, 1918–1939

Institutional Continuities and Disaffected EthnicGroups: the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav Cases

Czechoslovakia

The case of Czechoslovakia illustrates the problems of post-imperial transitionmost vividly precisely because this was the only East Central European state thatretained its democratic institutions and practices throughout the interwar period.The Czechoslovak state administration approximated Weber’s ideal typology ofthe modern, rational bureaucracy more closely than any of the other examples;moreover, its power was curtailed by democratic institutions. Nonetheless, thePrague government failed in its attempt to foster a common political identityamong Czechs and Slovaks.6

Czechoslovakia inherited from the imperial regime a body of experiencedCzech bureaucrats and administrators, who provided a considerable measure ofcontinuity and stability to the running of affairs in the new state after thecollapse of the Habsburg empire. Local civil servants in the Czech provinceswere simply kept in place under the new republic, and Czechs who had workedfor the central ministries in Vienna were brought back to help set up newministries in Prague. The Czech civil service retained something of the self-image of the Habsburg administration as a semi-autonomous institution playingan integrative and constructive role in society (rather than merely a mechanismfor the enforcement of existing law).

Czech political life was rich and diverse, with well-organized parties fromacross the ideological spectrum that had gained experience in grassroots organi-zation, electoral politics, and parliamentary tactics within the framework of theold Austrian constitutional system. Ethnic fragmentation had been the bane ofthe Austrian parliament, but the ceaseless confrontations between Czechs andethnic Germans had reinforced the need for cooperation among the Czechparties. The Czechs thus had a leadership cohort that had grown used to whatmight be termed “managed competition” in politics. That is to say, they stoodready to compete for power within the Czechoslovak state according to well-established liberal-democratic norms, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance, andwith an ability to form fairly effective governing coalitions once elections wereover.

The situation in Slovakia was markedly different. Although Slovakiacontained some of the most heavily industrialized zones of the Hungariankingdom, its economy remained overwhelmingly agrarian. Moreover, ownershipof capital had remained much more exclusively in the hands of non-Slavs(Germans, Magyars, Jews) than was the case in the Czech lands. The Hungarianconstitutional system had denied the Slovaks proportional representation inparliament, with the result that the Slovak political parties that emerged in 1918were inexperienced and unsure of themselves. Budapest had in fact pursued anactive policy of assimilating the tiny Slovak elite into Magyar culture, whiledenying social advancement to the peasant population. There had been noopportunities for higher education in the Slovak language. Those Slovaks who


wished to pursue their higher education in a Slavic language had been obliged tostudy in Prague (if they could circumvent Hungarian restrictions on that option).

Slovakia’s administration had been run exclusively in the Magyar languageand had been completely dominated by Magyars and Magyarized Slovaks.These elements remained overwhelmingly loyal to Hungary, as was demon-strated in 1919, when railway and postal officials went on strike in an attempt todisrupt Czechoslovak communications and transportation during the (unsuc-cessful) Hungarian invasion of Slovakia. When the bureaucracy was duly purgedof Magyars, there was no more than a tiny handful of qualified Slovaks availableto replace them.

Therefore, the political fissure that opened up between the Czech and Slovakcommunities almost as soon as the republic had been formed was not simply theresult of different conceptions of national identity. In the brave new world of thenation-state, institutional continuity was superimposed on political change. Thismade it all the more difficult to achieve the cultural synthesis that lay at the heartof Masaryk’s vision for Czechoslovakia. The deep gap between the levels ofpolitical sophistication and bureaucratic self-sufficiency of the Czech and Slovakprovinces was locked into place and perpetuated by the inclusion of Slovakia ina Czechoslovak state. A wave of Czech judges, administrators, schoolteachers,clerks, and notaries filled the vacuum left by the elimination of the Hungarianadministration.

In principle, the organization of Czechoslovakia’s electoral system wasdesigned to help overcome such disparities by guaranteeing proportional repre-sentation to every region and interest group. Yet, while the five political parties(known collectively as the Pětka) that dominated the parliamentary stage andthat consistently participated in governing coalitions all defined themselves asCzechoslovak in orientation, they were direct successors to pre-war Czechparties, and continued to be led and dominated by Czechs. The votes garneredby the Pětka in general elections never added up to much more than 50 per centof the total. Nonetheless, the pattern of cooperation the Pětka’s leaders hadestablished during their days in the Czech Club of the Austrian parliament,combined with the ease of access and regularized contact some of them enjoyedwith the powerful presidency of the Republic – an office occupied by TomášMasaryk until his death in 1937 – served to facilitate their collective dominationof the political system. Czechoslovak governments were formed and dissolvedwith dizzying frequency, but the main players from coalition to coalitionremained the leaders of the Pětka.

The distribution of power at the highest levels of government had its counter-part in the state bureaucracy. Each party tended to maintain control of specificministries even as one coalition gave way to another. This was precisely the sortof unwritten understanding that facilitated the division of power among theleading Czech-dominated parties; it also created a patronage system that rein-forced their grip on power and linked them to grassroots interests. Indeed, manyof the Slovaks who joined or voted for one or another of the Pětka parties did soin order to secure access to state resources for their districts or enterprises, rather


than out of ideological conviction or class consciousness. Yet in most governmentministries, Slovaks constituted no more than 1.6 per cent of the bureaucraticstaff. Those Slovaks who were co-opted into the system tended to beCzechophiles, many of them members of Slovakia’s enterprising and highlyeducated Protestant minority. Slovakia’s rural, Catholic majority was left feelingall the more alienated from the system.7

In the army, a similar situation prevailed. The rank and file, to be sure,consisted of conscripts from all regions and ethnic groups. The army’s only offi-cial language, though, was “Czechoslovak” – which in practice meant Czech, notSlovak.8 Moreover, almost 80 per cent of the officer corps was Czech. Thisseverely undermined the credibility of the army as an instrument of nationalintegration.9

It should come as no surprise that the very elements of institutional conti-nuity that served the interests of Czechs and led them to identify closely with thenew state profoundly alienated many Slovaks (not to speak of the ethnicGermans of the Sudetenland and the Magyars of southern Slovakia, whose indi-vidual civil rights were fully respected, but whose collective identities were notembodied either symbolically or institutionally by the state).10 Rather thanpromoting the creation of a new Czechoslovak identity, the Czech socio-politicalestablishment’s imposition of its institutions on Slovakia provoked the crystalliza-tion of a Slovak nationalism whose defining characteristic was a sense ofpromise betrayed. In the eyes of Father Andrej Hlinka’s clerical-conservative,Slovak Populist Party – which maintained a plurality of Slovak votes in parlia-mentary elections from the mid 1920s on – the prospect of self-determination inan autonomous republic had given way to virtual colonization by the Czechs.Suffering from a sense of socio-economic inferiority11 and political helplessnessvis-à-vis the central government, Slovak nationalists cultivated what LiahGreenfeld (borrowing from Nietzsche) refers to as ressentiment: a sense of resent-ment and injured dignity on the part of an underdeveloped, traditional society,that manifests itself in a compensatory assertion of moral superiority over thematerialistic and permissive culture of the (unfairly advantaged) Other.12 In thiscase, the role of the Other was played by Prague, and all the ills suffered bySlovakia were blamed on the Czech-dominated political system. Slovak cultureand identity were seen as besieged by an arrogant Czech intelligentsia and polit-ical leadership that was reluctant to recognize the equality of the Slovaklanguage and way of life. Czechoslovakism was regarded as nothing more than afaçade for the imposition of Godless Czech values on a Slovak society that tookpride in its Catholic traditions. The growth of the Slovak educational systemunder the auspices of the interwar republic only served to create a more politi-cized and articulate intelligentsia that was acutely aware of how great thedevelopmental gap between Slovakia and the Czech lands still was, and all themore inclined to point an accusing finger at Prague.

Thus, even in the most democratic of the successor states that emerged fromthe rubble of empires, the nation-integrating roles of government and bureau-cracy were undermined by legacies of the old regime.13 The polarizing impact


of institutional continuities on ethnic relations was all the more dramatic inother newly established or newly expanded polities in the region – most notablyYugoslavia.

Yugoslavia

From its very establishment, the kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was runas an extension of the old kingdom of Serbia. The kingdom of Serbia haddefined itself as a nation-state, and this case therefore diverges from thischapter’s theme of imperial legacies burdening the political cultures of newnation-states. But the basic problem of regime continuity in the face of a radi-cally reconfigured ethnographic scene manifested itself dramatically here. Forthe sake of simplicity, I will focus on the particularly troublesome case ofSerb–Croat relations here, although the country’s ethnographic map includedmany other nationalities.

During the parliamentary democracy of 1918–1929, the old Serbian RadicalParty that had led the country into war in 1914 remained almost constantly inpower at the head of shaky coalitions, despite the opposition of Stjepan Radić’sCroatian Peasant Party (see Chapter 3) to its centralizing policies. The Radicalspatched together parliamentary majorities by playing on the multinationalmakeup of the electorate to their advantage. Ethnic parties that demanded analleviation of this or that local grievance were negotiated with, so that compro-mise could be avoided with those that demanded a devolution of power to theirhistoric provinces or a substantial share of power at the center. This tactic waseffective for a number of years, but in the long term it only accentuated the frag-mented nature of the country’s body politic. In 1929, parliamentary politicswere suspended as the country fell under a monarchic dictatorship.14

The Serbs’ political hegemony was reinforced by their disproportionate repre-sentation at the highest levels of government, as well as in the administrationand army. Although they constituted no more than roughly 40 per cent of thecountry’s population, Serbs virtually monopolized the top cabinet positionsthroughout the interwar period, and exploited their control of the civil servicefor purposes of political patronage and ethnic favoritism. Seventy-nine per centof the officer corps was Serb, the diplomatic service was overwhelmingly Serb incomposition, and the state-owned banks – cornerstones of the country’s financialsystem – were all headed by Serbs.

This political-bureaucratic elite was deeply intermeshed with the most influ-ential Serb commercial and financial circles, the higher clergy in the SerbianOrthodox Church, and the wealthiest stratum of Serb peasants. The govern-ment catered to these groups through its patronage networks and served theirfinancial interests through favorable tax laws, tariff policies, and cheap loansfrom the state banks. The distinction between public service and private profitwas blurred as members of the socio-economic elite moved in and out of publicoffice, exploiting their political power to enrich themselves and their associates.Outright corruption was also rampant.


What made this situation particularly galling to the Croat elites was that theiraverage level of education and economic development was higher than that ofthe Serbs. Whereas in Czech-dominated Slovakia there was a genuine shortageof skilled administrators, Croatia had a fairly sophisticated intelligentsia thatfound its path to upward mobility in the civil service blocked by what was seen asa policy of blatant discrimination. The entrenchment of the Serb ruling classeswas seen as part of a deliberate policy of Greater Serbian nationalism that wasnot only excluding Croats from a fair share of power in Belgrade, but marginal-izing them within their own provinces.

The result of Belgrade’s policies was not just to alienate the Croat elites, butto exacerbate the suspicions and resentments of the Croat peasantry as well. Atfirst glance, this may seem surprising, for one of the first acts of the kingdom ofSerbs, Croats, and Slovenes was to promise agrarian-reform legislation thatwould abolish the last vestiges of feudalism and redistribute land more fairlyamong the peasantry of the new territories which had fallen under Belgrade’scontrol.15 This program responded to one of the most deeply felt grievancesamong the peasantry of the South Slav lands, whose attachment to, and claim topersonal ownership of, the soil they tilled had antedated their development ofnational consciousness and sense of collective territoriality.

However, land reform was a complex process that, in some regions, was notentirely completed by the end of the interwar period. While the reform didresult in a more equitable division of land, many of the smaller farms to whichthis gave rise did not prove economically viable, afflicted as they were by prob-lems such as rural overpopulation, unfavorable price structures, heavy taxburdens, and tight credit. The state-owned banks’ tendency to use their relativelycheap lines of credit in a selective and discriminatory manner certainly did notenhance the credibility of the state among the peasantry in general.16

Resentment of the state was particularly deep-seated among the peasants ofthe largely non-Serb, newly acquired territories, since this is precisely where theexpectations of a rapid and radical break with past socio-economic patterns hadbeen the highest. Moreover, faux pas were committed and misunderstandingsarose that might have been avoided had a greater effort been made to grantautonomous political and administrative roles to native leaderships in the non-Serb regions (although the situation was complicated by the existence of sizableSerb minorities in Bosnia and Croatia). To take just one example, the Serbianarmy had a longstanding practice of branding superior-quality draft animals as away of identifying them for potential requisitioning in the event of war. Whenintroduced overnight in Croatia, where the practice was unknown, it was greetedwith incomprehension and anger by farmers who felt that their finest animalswere being gratuitously mutilated. The issue contributed significantly to theoutbreak of the Croatian peasants’ rebellion of 1920.

Thus, the imposition of the pre-existing Serbian political-administrativesystem throughout the newly expanded post-1918 kingdom confirmed non-Serbs’ impression that the ideology of Yugoslav fraternal union and nationalintegration was nothing but a sham. Notably, in Croatia, Belgrade’s repressive


tactics spurred a steady growth in support for the Croatian Peasant Party amongthe intelligentsia and middle classes. In other words, Croatia’s inclusion in aSerb-dominated state turned out to be an important catalyst for the growth of aCroatian ethnonational identity that narrowed the gap between rural under-classes and urban elites, while distancing itself from the discredited ideal ofYugoslav unitarism. The progressive alienation of Croat peasants and elites alikeculminated in their shocked reaction to the fatal shooting of Stjepan Radić andthe wounding or killing of several of his colleagues on the floor of the nationalparliament in June 1928 by a Serb nationalist deputy. The political crisis thatensued led to the dissolution of parliament and creation of a royal dictatorshipin January 1929.

During the 1930s, the political brittleness of the new regime, combined withthe impact of the global Depression, accelerated the process of political polar-ization and fragmentation along ethnic lines. The Croatian Peasant Party, nowunder the leadership of Vladko Maček, continued to expand its base of supportby turning to the right – abandoning the anti-clerical principles of its founders(who, it will be recalled, had been strongly influenced by the teachings of TomášMasaryk) and forging an alliance with the Catholic Church. At the same time,the seeming futility of the Peasant Party’s continued openness to dialogue withthe Serbs and embrace of democratic methods earned it the hostility and deri-sion of a small but active rival on the far right of Croatian politics – the Ustaša.Founded in the late 1920s by veterans of the old Frankist party, the Ustašaupdated the virulently chauvinistic Croatian nationalism of the Frankists bydressing it up in fascist garb: a leadership cult was organized around the move-ment’s founder, Ante Pavelić, racist themes were highlighted in the Ustaša’santi-Serb propaganda, and the militaristic structures and ethos of Italian fascismwere incorporated into the movement. The Ustaša, which enjoyed Italian andHungarian backing, compensated for its limited popular support by resorting toterrorist attacks, including the assassination of King Alexander during his visit toFrance in 1934, in its campaign to subvert the authority of the Belgrade regime.It was eventually catapulted into power in Croatia by the Axis forces thatinvaded Yugoslavia in 1941.

Just as in the Czechoslovak case then, only more so, the Yugoslav politicalelite’s domination by members of one ethnic group who adhered to pre-warnorms in the governance of an ethnographically transformed state had helpedundermine the credibility of the ethos of interethnic Slav fraternity from whichthe state derived its legitimacy. Indeed, Belgrade’s policies contributed to theconsolidation of Croatian national identity among an unprecedentedly broadcross-section of the Croat population and had a similar effect on the country’sother ethnic and ethno-religious communities, while at the same time under-mining and discrediting democratic institutions and inter-communalcompromise or coalition-building.


Revolutionary Elites in Reactionary Roles: Poland andthe Arab Middle East

Continuities between old regime and new could have a significant impact notonly on interethnic relations, but also on the development of national conscious-ness and nationalist politics among the dominant nationalities of the new states.In East Central Europe, it is the Polish case and in the Middle East, Iraq – and,to some extent, Syria – that illustrate the incongruities of the postwar transitionmost dramatically, for in all these instances, veterans of wartime nationalistlegions and clandestine organizations assumed prominent roles in the new states’political leaderships, yet, once in power, fell back on old practices in their pursuitof novel goals.

Having played the role of self-selected nationalist vanguards during the war,figures such as the officers of Piłsudski’s First Brigade or of the Sharifian Armythought of themselves as a self-contained essence of the nation, whose esprit decorps and discipline had provided a glimmer of what their people as a wholemight achieve once its full potential was unleashed. By the same token, suchgroups thought their wartime exploits entitled them to positions of privilege inthe new nation-states. Over time, so they thought, they would use their power toshape the masses in their own image and help achieve the ideals of freedom andunity that had animated their own wartime actions. But in the name of politicalequality and collective liberty, socio-political hierarchies and modes of gover-nance took shape that seemed remarkably reminiscent of older political cultures.

Poland

Interwar Poland was riven not only by interethnic tensions (as described inChapter 6), but by deep political and ideological divisions among the ethnicPoles themselves. Here, as elsewhere, the imperial legacy weighed heavily on thenew state, one of whose major challenges was how to bring administrative andjudicial unity to the three former imperial partitions of Poland.17 This was a taskmade all the more difficult by the devastation of the First World War, the occu-pying German forces’ systematic ransacking of the country’s industrialinfrastructure, and the ravages of the 1920 Polish–Soviet war.

What made matters worse was the ongoing rivalry between Piłsudski’s andDmowski’s camps – itself a legacy of pre-war ideological divisions over how torespond to Russian imperial repression. This political blood feud drove a wedgethrough Polish society and politics at every level, as each side strove to infiltrate,or forge alliances with, as broad a cross-section of socio-economic interests andpolitical parties as possible. The army’s officer corps was divided between associ-ates of Piłsudski and veterans of rival wartime volunteer formations such asGeneral Józef Haller’s Polish Corps. There were also many Polish officersabsorbed from the old Habsburg, Russian, and German armies, many of whomwere regarded by Piłsudski’s legionnaires as unpatriotic elements that had norightful place in a Polish national army. The former imperial officers (especially


the large Habsburg contingent), in turn, despised the ex-legionnaires asamateurish upstarts who had no place in a professional military force.18

The turbulence and polarization of parliamentary politics in the early 1920swas aggravated by violent incidents – most notably the assassination in 1922 ofGabriel Narutowicz, the man Piłsudski had backed to succeed him as President –as well as by corruption among parliamentary deputies, rising unemployment,labor unrest, and the inconsistent and half-hearted implementation of alreadymodest land-reform legislation. It was in this context that Piłsudski carried outhis 1926 coup d’état with the support of his loyalists within the army and of ageneral strike called by the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). Seizing Warsaw after athree-day battle that cost nearly 400 lives, Piłsudski did not assume personalcontrol of the presidency or premiership, but made sure that those offices wereoccupied by candidates of his choice; constitutional reforms were also quicklyenacted granting new powers to the presidency. Piłsudski’s position in the newgovernment as Minister of War gave him command of the army, and thisallowed him to exercise ultimate control over political power while maintainingan aura of legality.

The coup held forth the promise of containing the forces of right-wing chau-vinism and social conservatism and of reforming Polish political institutions andculture along broadly integrative lines. It brought to power veterans ofPiłsudski’s wartime military formations, who saw themselves as a nonpartisan,selflessly patriotic elite that would make a final break with outdated mentalitiesand corrupt values born of over a century of servitude to imperial masters.

But the legionnaires’ sense of commitment to the Polish nation had alwaysbeen colored by a deep distrust of the feckless masses who had failed to flock totheir standards in 1914 (see Chapter 5). Their self-image as unrewarded heroeshad deepened into a virtual cult of their own victimhood under the impact ofthe political turmoil of the early 1920s. This was a mentality that was activelycultivated by Piłsudski himself. His speeches of those years were characterized bya bitter and gloomy view of himself and his former comrades of the Legions asvirtuous heroes surrounded by poisonous slanderers and evildoers who wereunworthy of Poland and who must ultimately be swept out of power one way oranother. In an address delivered just after his 1923 resignation as Army Chief ofStaff, he described his experience as an embattled leader in the following terms:

I was set up higher than anyone had ever been set before, so that I cast myshadow upon all, standing alone in the light. Yet, there was a shadow whichencircled me, which went before me, which remained behind me. Therewere many such shadows. These shadows surrounded me always, intangible,following me step by step, pursuing me and mimicking me. Whether on thefield of battle, whether quietly at work … or caressing my child, this shadowpursued me inseparably. A monstrous dwarf on crooked legs, spitting out hisdirty soul, spitting at me from every side, sparing nothing that should bespared, neither my family life nor my friends, following my steps, makingmonkey grimaces, distorting every thought. … This dwarf was my insepa-


rable companion … in good fortune and ill, in victory and defeat. Do notimagine, gentlemen, that this is only a metaphor. …

After going on to speak of the murder of Narutowicz, he concluded:

In recalling these things to your minds, in sketching the history of the pastfive years, I do not in the least wish to make an impression of tragedy. I onlywish to state that here is filth, and that it is given honour and power inPoland. … If Poland succeeded in reforming the republic in the first period,it began subsequently to fall back into its old habits and … great efforts arenecessary … to restore Poland to the path of reform.19

The self-righteous and morbidly self-pitying tone of this call for reform did notaugur well for the ex-legionnaires’ prospects as the vanguard of political progressin Poland.

Piłsudski’s post-coup regime was known as the Sanacja (literally, the “purifica-tion” or “sanitization”). Largely composed of non-party civil servants, it wasintended to eliminate corruption and factionalism from Polish government andto promote the economic regeneration and national integration of the country.Personal ability and commitment to reform, rather than political connections,were henceforth supposed to determine appointments and promotions in thestate administration. Yet this supposedly nonpartisan, national government soondegenerated into a pattern of corruption and abuse of power that discredited itin the eyes of much of the public, and that contributed to the politicalmomentum of Poland’s nascent fascist movement. It soon became apparent thatformer service in Piłsudski’s legions was the most important measure of merit inthe new system. This was most immediately manifest in the ranks of the army’sofficer corps, which was methodically purged of anti-Piłsudski figures, who werereplaced by loyal veterans of the First Brigade and the POW (see Chapter 5). By1939, some 65 per cent of the army’s high officers were ex-legionnaires. Thislegionnaire-ridden army was elevated in the public eye to the status of untouch-able symbol and protector of national unity. To criticize it was to be unpatriotic.The officer corps, in turn, served as a recruitment pool for high administrativeand political appointees.20

Over the course of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Piłsudski disappointed hiswould-be allies in the PPS by abandoning all pretense of social reformism andseeking the support of conservative agrarian and industrial interests and theChurch. His aim was to isolate the Endecja and to build a strong, “non-ideolog-ical,” centrist consensus as the foundation for his power. A “Non-Party Bloc forthe Support of the Government” (BBWR) was formed as the parliamentarywing of the Sanacja, consisting, as usual, of ex-legionnaires as well as a numberof influential landowners. The personality cult that grew around Piłsudski andthe cultivation of the legend of the First Brigade functioned as substitutes forany coherent political program.21 The more resistance Piłsudski’s authoritarianstyle provoked, the more arbitrary his rule became. The façade of legality


became increasingly difficult to maintain in the face of mounting oppositionfrom the political center and left, to which Piłsudski responded with increasinglyrepressive measures. The unavoidable consequence of the Marshal’s22 autocraticrule was a growing alienation between Polish society and the self-appointed elitethat was running it. The precipitous drop in agricultural prices and rise in unem-ployment during the Depression of the 1930s, which the government’s 1936recovery program could only begin to redress, made matters even worse.23

During the 1930s, while the Sanacja monopolized power in the name of ill-defined étatist principles, Dmowski’s Endecja gained popular support, especiallyamong the university students and young intelligentsia whose dim employmentopportunities in a period of economic crisis heightened their resentment ofJewish academic competition. Unlike the left-center opposition, Dmowski didnot defend parliamentary democracy as such. Instead, from 1926 on, helaunched a frontal attack on the regime’s central claim to power – the notionthat it somehow transcended class interests and political factions, that itembodied the true will of the nation. Dmowski portrayed the Sanacja as nothingbut a cabal of Jews and freemasons determined to exploit the Polish people fortheir own ends. Openly rejecting the liberal-democratic façade that he hadhimself helped construct for the National Democrats, Dmowski fostered thedevelopment of fascism among the radical right-wing youth of the movement.

The legionnaires’ self-image as the vanguard of the Polish nation had become aself-serving and corrosive myth. During 1914–1918, the men of the FirstBrigade and the POW had been a bold band of rebels in the nationalist cause,dedicated amateurs who despised those professional officers who remainedunquestioningly loyal to the Habsburg military, and who were firm in the beliefthat their willpower, their esprit de corps, and their devotion to their commandercould prevail in the face of the apathy of the masses and the tyranny of theoccupying powers. While inspired by the romantic image of Poland’s nineteenth-century aristocratic rebels, they undertook their own actions in a spirit ofegalitarian camaraderie, valuing men for their deeds and not their birth. Theysaw themselves as the forerunners of a whole new generation of Poles, a genera-tion that would be born into freedom rather than imperial servitude. At one andthe same time, they saw themselves as a natural elite – an elite of courage andself-sacrifice, rather than birth or wealth, and thus the ideal leaders of a repub-lican meritocracy.

By the time of Piłsudski’s death in 1935, the legionnaires had becomecorrupted by power, drunk on their own myths, and unable to strike a resonantchord among either the intelligentsia or the masses. Their claim to power restedon assumptions that seemed to parody the old notion that the gentry constitutedthe political nation and that the masses were simply objects of their patriarchalcare. In fact, having discredited parliamentary democracy, Piłsudski and hisfollowers were unable to construct a viable alternative to it. The Endecja’s fascist,violently anti-Semitic brand of nationalism moved into the breach, playing anincreasingly dominant role in shaping public opinion and popular conceptions of


national identity. Following the Marshal’s demise, the Sanacja remained inpower, but its repressive practices and its own increasing exploitation of anti-Semitism were a testimony to the bankruptcy of its values. The final, bitterhurrah of the Legions came in 1939, when the former legionnaires who nowmade up the bulk of the officer corps led the country’s hopeless resistance to theinvading German and Soviet forces that annihilated both them and the statethey had created.

Syria and Iraq

In Syria and Iraq, the closed nature of the political elites and their reliance ontraditional, patrimonial forms of wielding authority clashed directly with themyths and images of national unity and mass engagement that they themselvesdiffused. As we have seen (Chapter 3), Ottoman authority in Syria andMesopotamia had been anchored in the support and cooperation of the class ofabsentee landlords and bureaucrats commonly referred to as the urban notables.These public officials belonged to a very distinct socio-economic class; their inde-pendent wealth and their personal influence in specific regions or evenneighborhoods were essential to their ability to gain public office in the first placeand to carry out their duties once in office. It was also taken for granted that theywould exploit their position in the administration to enrich themselves. Briberywas endemic, though not officially condoned. At the same time, the reforms ofthe nineteenth century had created a more centralized administrative structureand better lines of communication between Istanbul and the Arab provinces thanever before. Increasingly, aspirants to high office were expected to receive formaltraining, most commonly at the Mülkiye – the administrative school in Istanbul.Thus, as in the case of the imperial Russian bureaucracy, the status, functions,education, and mentality of this stratum were such as to place it in between MaxWeber’s two typologies of state service: patrimonial administration and modern,rationalized, impersonal bureaucracy. The former design remained basically inplace, but elements of the latter were being woven into it.24

This pattern carried over into the political culture of the post-First WorldWar nationalist elites in Syria and Iraq. The young Arabists of the pre-FirstWorld War period had plunged into their political careers enthralled by theprospect of Western-style free discourse and parliamentary government that wasopened up by the Young Turks’ revolution of 1908. They had espoused Arabnationalism partly in response to the Young Turks’ failure to fulfill that prospect.Yet by the 1930s, it had become apparent that the methods and mentalities ofnationalist political parties in the Arab countries were themselves more akin tothe corrupt and autocratic political culture of the Ottoman empire than to theliberal-democratic ideals over which the Arab nationalists had once seemed soenthusiastic.

Philip Khoury’s study of the National Bloc that led opposition to the Frenchin Syria has shown that its growing power was grounded not in electoral politicsper se, but in the ability of the notables who led it to dole out favors, mediate


disputes, and enforce their will in specific quarters of their native towns. Theyused local merchants and religious dignitaries, as well as neighborhoodstrongmen (qabadayat), as day-to-day intermediaries with the lower classes. Thisform of influence was then used to gain success at the polls. The Syrian nation-alist leaders certainly evinced no interest in socio-economic reform: the personalfinancial independence so vital to their participation in politics was based on theunequal distribution of resources – particularly the glaringly disproportionateconcentration of agricultural land in their hands; their ideological legitimacywas derived from their ability to bring pressure to bear upon the French authori-ties, on whom all social and economic ills were blamed.25

At the time that they began to oppose Ottomanism, the Syrian Arab national-ists had been office seekers, denied by the Young Turks the opportunity to hold thepositions of influence and respect that they considered their rightful due.Frustrated and resentful, they sincerely felt that the time had come for radicalchanges in the rules of the political game. By the 1930s, when the opportunity tobecome office holders seemed at last to present itself within the framework ofcontinued French influence in Syria, the former office seekers were reverting tomentalities and behavior patterns characteristic of their fathers and grandfa-thers, who had held positions of authority in the region during the second halfof the nineteenth century. Much like the Italian political leadership after theRisorgimento, they continued to define themselves as a heroic nationalistvanguard while behaving more and more like an abusive and self-serving offi-cialdom. Moreover, their ranks had grown to include many figures who had infact held positions of authority down to the last days of the Ottoman empire,and whose conversion to Arab nationalism was more a matter of opportunismthan of conviction. The political outlook of the leading Syrian nationalists waslimited by a narrow-mindedness and arrogance that betrayed their origins as alandowning elite that had purchased its way into the Ottoman bureaucraticapparatus.26

This gap between ideological form and cultural content manifested itself ineverything from the formal attire of the urban notables to their political tactics.They combined the fez with the frock-coat, in an awkward synthesis of MiddleEastern and Western garb.27 The Bloc’s leaders used their traditional, segmentedpower base to promote a vision of the Syrian nation as an integrated politicalcommunity of which they were the sole legitimate representatives.28 Theyconceived of independent Syria as a secular republic, while encouragingpreachers in mosques to rally popular support by depicting the French asenemies of Islam. They attacked the mandatory government for inhibiting thedevelopment of parliamentary democracy in Syria, but ran their own party likea Mafia organization. They sought to instill the virtues of discipline and self-sacrifice among their followers, yet grasped hungrily at the perquisites of publicoffice.

In Iraq, the post-First World War political elite was dominated by officersfrom the Northern Army of the Arab Revolt, who rose to power under theauspices of the Hashemite monarchy that was established with the support of


the British mandatory authorities. Linked by years of common experience in theIstanbul military academy (the Harbiye), in secret political clubs like al-‘Ahd, andin the Sharifian army, this cohort saw itself as the natural leadership of the Iraqination and the pan-Arab cause. Like the ex-legionnaires of Piłsudski’s post-1926regime, they saw themselves as history’s chosen elite whose role it was to forge asense of common identity among the country’s fragmented population.

Yet their methods of governance did not adequately serve their professedaspirations. Iraq’s new governing clique rapidly fell into habits and mindsetsmore commonly associated with a jaded, old ruling class than with a radicalpolitical vanguard. The co-optation of existing power structures offered the pathof least resistance for a new regime seeking to establish its legitimacy andauthority. In tribal areas, shaykhs were made responsible for tax collection, inreturn for all sorts of personal exemptions and the institutionalization of theircustomary (and not so customary) powers. In the agricultural village, the writ ofthe government was enforced by doling out favors to the mukhtar (villageheadman) – usually a wealthier than average peasant whose position was increas-ingly resented by his poorer neighbors as their livelihood was steadilyundermined by the commercialization of agriculture. In the old city quarters,the local strongmen and religious dignitaries were the daily intermediaries withthe masses. The new rulers sought to gain the acceptance and support of thetraditional landowning bureaucrats by appointing them to high office andallowing them to consolidate their economic stranglehold on the impoverishedpeasantry. Indeed, members of the old and new ruling strata were increasinglyinterlinked through marriage ties; bonds of kinship reinforced class and politicalidentity.29 The Sharifians themselves quickly adopted the time-honored practiceof using their political power and their control of the legal system to lay claim tohuge tracts of agricultural land and to enrich themselves as rapidly as possible.The development of the oil industry by Western firms that shared their profitsdirectly with the government served to enhance the financial autonomy of theregime as well as its leading figures’ opportunities for illicit personal gain. As forthe institutions of parliamentary democracy, they were treated as contrivancesdesigned for legitimizing the decisions of the ruling class.30

The vocabulary of liberal democracy had been widespread in the political-reform movements of the late Ottoman empire, but like the Young Turks beforethem, the Iraqi Arab nationalists were a small clique that had come to powervirtually overnight in an overwhelmingly illiterate, extremely heterogeneous, andprofoundly hierarchical society. Imposition from above seemed to be the onlypossible method of effecting rapid political change. The military background ofthe Sharifians, their education in the German-run, Ottoman military academy,the powerful example of Mustafa Kemal’s revolution-from-above in Turkey – allserved to reinforce their authoritarian approach to politics. A sense of nationalidentity and common purpose was to be transmitted to the masses from on high;there was no need to try and involve them directly in the political process.31

Accordingly, the Sharifian elite cultivated Iraq’s military and educationalinstitutions as instruments for the forging of a cohesive, mass-based Iraqi and


pan-Arab consciousness. These programs were employed instead of, rather thanin addition to, the cultivation of autonomous civic associations, the forging ofbroadly based bonds of material interest, and the encouragement of patterns ofpolitical cooperation and power-sharing among the diverse components of Iraqisociety. The tactics of negative integration – scapegoating of minorities andpropaganda against external enemies – played the most prominent role in thestate’s efforts to convince both itself and its popular audience that the mirage ofnational unity could be turned into a reality. Most notably, the attempt by theAssyrian (Nestorian) Christian community to gain official autonomy was met bya series of massacres (claiming hundreds of lives) on the part of the Iraqi armyin 1933. The resultant outpouring of public enthusiasm for the army as guar-antor of Iraq’s unity and defender of its honor marked the highpoint (so tospeak) of the Hashemite regime’s national-integration enterprise.32

Along with the army, Iraq’s educational system served as a key mechanism forthe creation of a sense of national identity. The father of the Iraqi educationalsystem was Sati‘ al-Husri, a pan-Arab ideologue of Syrian parentage.Interestingly, in his early incarnation as an Ottoman educator, he had been anadvocate of a liberal, individualist curriculum that would breed tolerance andunderstanding among the diverse ethnic and religious groups of Ottomansociety and had criticized Turkish nationalists for their narrow-minded chau-vinism. The French occupation of Syria in 1920 had contributed to hisalienation from the liberal West European conception of nationalism and rein-forced his growing fascination with Germany’s populist-authoritarian völkischtradition. As Iraq’s Director General of Education during 1921–1927, al-Husribuilt up the public education system at the expense of the denominationalschools, seeking to use pedagogy as an instrument of mass indoctrination insecular, pan-Arab nationalism. The rigidly centralized curriculum he devisedrewarded students for the rote memorization of nationalist clichés.33

Following al-Husri’s departure from office, the chauvinistic themes of primaryand secondary education were further enhanced. The Zionist enterprise inPalestine, as well as the French presence in Syria and Lebanon, were portrayedas the main obstacles to Arab unification – obstacles that would ultimately beovercome by force of arms. Ancient Arab conquests were glorified as a spur tothe achievement of Arab unity in the near future – with Iraq in the role ofunifier, on the model of Piedmont’s role in Italian unification, or Prussia’s inGerman unification. Al-Husri’s successor, Sami Shawkat, was an outspoken pro-Nazi enthusiast who expanded the school system’s paramilitary training programinto a full-fledged youth movement (al-Futuwwah – The Youth) directly inspiredby the Hitler Youth. Shawkat publicly called upon Iraqi secondary-schoolstudents to devote themselves to the “Profession of Death” – that is to killing anddying on behalf of the pan-Arab cause.34 Meanwhile, in Syria, the NationalBloc formed a paramilitary organization called the Steel Shirts, which wasclearly modeled on fascist prototypes – right down to the raised-arm salute.35 Yetwhile public rhetoric in the Arab world was dominated by the new talk ofnationalism, the sinews of power remained attached to the old framework of


patronage politics, regional interests, and tribal loyalties that had prevailed underthe aegis of the Ottomans.36

Such incongruities between the professed ideology and the political culture ofthe Syrian and Iraqi nationalist leaderships bred growing discontent among anew generation of high-school and university students, intellectuals, and militaryofficers (in the Iraqi case), who had been steeped in the propaganda of nation-alism but failed to see the concrete realization of its goals and who were angeredby their dim prospects of material or professional advancement in the face of theconstricting influence of patronage politics and the growing economic difficultiesof the interwar years. These elements, mostly middle class in origin, questionedthe wisdom and integrity of the political establishment and began to form newparties that combined the open embrace of authoritarianism and a republicanvision of pan-Arab union with advocacy of social reform and a professedconcern for the dispossessed masses. Organizations such as the League ofNational Action, which brought together radical pan-Arab nationalists fromIraq, Transjordan, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria at a conference in Qarna’il,Lebanon in 1933, sought to borrow and improve upon the fascist-style propa-ganda and mobilization tactics that the Iraqi regime and Syrian National Blocthemselves were experimenting with, with the intention of using them to createmore modern, mass-based political parties that would bypass the patronagenetworks of the established elites and that would disregard and ultimately doaway with the “artificial” state boundaries imposed upon the Arab world by theimperial powers.

During the 1930s, these embryonic movements failed to establish organiza-tional bases among their countries’ underclasses. Moreover, their leaders werevulnerable to the elites’ mastery of the politics of co-optation and marginaliza-tion. But veterans of such early endeavors were to go on to play important rolesin the officers’ movements and political parties (most notably the Ba‘ath Partythat was to establish totalitarian-style nationalist regimes in Syria and Iraq in the1960s) that transformed the political life of the Arab world in the second half ofthe twentieth century.37

Conclusion

The passage from imperial old regime to nation-state entailed more than atemporary adjustment crisis. It was in many respects a formative process thatmarked the political culture and institutions of the new states for decades tocome. One of the cardinal features of this transition was the persistence of oldruling classes or old habits of mind and conceptions of power among the verybureaucratic and political elites responsible for promoting the integration ofthese societies around ideals of popular sovereignty and common national iden-tity. The fact that the political experience of many of the nationalist movementshad been limited to attacking state power rather than wielding it may have madethem all the more prone to fall back upon the personnel and/or methods of oldregimes as they struggled to consolidate their authority over their fragile new


nation-states. Peasant populations, local elites, and ethnic minorities found them-selves politically marginalized and treated like colonial subjects. Their alienationwas all the greater for the apparently empty talk of unity, equal rights, and self-determination that dominated official rhetoric and that was actively propagatedby state-run educational systems.

In the cases of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, the domination of the polit-ical, military, and bureaucratic apparatuses by ethnic groups with pre-warexperience in the exercise of administrative and political power, belied the offi-cial ideologies of national unity or fraternal coexistence and colored theimplementation of policies designed to foster political integration. In Poland aswell as in Iraq and Syria, veterans of nationalist legions and of clandestine resis-tance movements who considered themselves to be in the vanguard of changebecame obstacles to the fulfillment of the goals they espoused, as they reverted tothe political style of another age. Their degeneration into self-enclosed, corruptelites undermined the credibility of liberal-democratic institutions, as did theirincreasing tendency to resort to the politics of negative integration through thescapegoating of minorities. The severe material hardships of the interwar yearsfurther aggravated popular resentments over the gap between the promise andthe reality of national self-determination and broadened the gulf of suspicionand distrust between rulers and masses.

All this is not to suggest that the founding fathers of the new states were insin-cere in their demands for national self-determination. Nationalism was morethan a façade employed to delude the masses; as in the case of the Czech polit-ical leadership, the ex-legionnaires in Poland, and the Serbian ruling class, so tooin the Middle East, nationalism provided a raison d’être for the old-new elites thatwas essential for their own sense of purpose and of self-importance. Whetherthey were born into notable families of long standing or were products of themilitary academy in Istanbul, they were convinced it was their role to dominatethe political and social life of their countries – and their privilege to profit fromthis position of pre-eminence. With the collapse of imperial rule, nationalismoffered a new logic for a continuation or revival of the old ways. In the MiddleEast, where new imperial oversight replaced Ottoman rule, the nationalists’function as mediators of their societies’ relationships with the European manda-tory powers reinforced their sense of being indispensable as their nations’leaders. At the same time, the British and French imperial presence seemed tofree them of direct responsibility for whatever ills befell their people.38 But astime went on, the political conduct of the nationalist elites seemed to grow everless responsive to the public expectations that their own ideologies had spawned.

Such a broadening rift between governments and publics was a severehindrance to political stability in the wake of the war and its aftermath, whichhad spurred the growth of political consciousness and expectations of powerredistribution among broad segments of both urban and rural populations. Theeconomic ravages of the Great Depression in the 1930s reinforced widespreadsentiments to the effect that the nationalist regimes had failed to fulfill thepromise of the nationalist movements. Throughout much of Europe, the liberal-


democratic values that had appeared triumphant in 1918–1919 appeared to besuccumbing to the onslaught of fascism.39 This created opportunities for radicalright-wing nationalist movements – some of which had roots in the pre-warnationalist right (Croatia’s Frankists, Poland’s Endecja) – to challenge theauthority and question the integrity of the nation-states’ founding fathers. Theexisting regimes’ own opportunistic resort to minority-baiting or finger-pointingat foreign foes only helped legitimize and make respectable more extreme formsof nationalist xenophobia. High-school and university students concerned abouttheir chances of employment in financially strapped government bureaucraciesor shrinking professional and commercial sectors and, in some cases, concernedabout competition from ethnic minorities, were readily drawn to political partiesthat accused their governments of corruption and elitism, derided parliamentarydemocracy (where its façade still existed) as a sham, and presented themselves asmore genuinely concerned with the empowerment of the nation’s masses andthe unconditional realization of national unity at the expense of all internal andexternal “enemies.”40 The Italian Fascist and German Nazi movements wereinfluential models for the youthful enthusiasts who flocked to Dmowski’s recon-structed Endecja in the 1930s and for the Syrian and Iraqi students andintellectuals and Iraqi junior officers who were drawn to embryonic pan-Arabistparties that professed a commitment to the Arab masses and that were not tiedto the patronage networks of the old nationalist elites. A similar phenomenonoccurred in Romania, where the resentment of students over academic competi-tion from Jews and of peasants over the prominent role of Jews and othernon-Romanian nationalities as commercial middlemen, converged in the frame-work of Codreanu’s fascist Iron Guard movement. In Estonia, the League ofVeterans played a similar role.41

Even if these movements did not succeed in seizing the reins of power duringthe interwar years, they contributed to the breakdown of parliamentary institu-tions where such institutions had functioned at all, helped shift their countries’political fulcra to the right, and contributed to the deterioration of conditions forminorities. Meanwhile, in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, it was among disem-powered minorities that resentment over the ethnic double-standards andquasi-imperial mentalities of their new rulers contributed to the growth of reac-tionary or fascistic forms of nationalism. By the end of the interwar period,liberal nationalism no longer seemed viable as a framework for stability in post-imperial nation-states, while the alternatives threatened to be even worse.


A comparative overview of some of the nation-states formed in the wake of theFirst World War suggests that the attainment of national independence consti-tuted a risk-laden transition into an unfamiliar political landscape, an excitingand treacherous new terrain that shimmered with utopian mirages while quick-sand lurked underfoot. The societies that ventured forth into the Promised Landof national self-determination were divided by different expectations of where itsborders would lie, how it should be cultivated, and who was entitled to partake ofits fruits. The sense of disappointment in the reality of the nation-state was allthe deeper for the majesty of the dreams that had first animated the liberationmovements. The irony we are left with is that the First World War led directly tothe enthronement of national self-determination as the sovereign principle ofthe international system, while at the same time sowing the seeds of failure forthe new political orders founded on that principle.

By its third and fourth years, the Great War was leading to a rapid escalationof nationalist sentiments, activities, and expectations across a broad range ofsocial classes, political organizations, and military formations in East CentralEurope, the Russian empire, and the Middle East. A wide array of factorsconverged to cause and reinforce this trend. Among most of the belligerentstates, the corrosive grind of total war and the political repression and economicexactions associated with it served to magnify the differences between haves andhave-nots: those who were provided with the necessities of life and those who feltcheated of their livelihoods, those who had access to political power and thosewho felt subject to the arbitrary whims of the ruling elites, those who had adirect emotional or ideological stake in the triumph of their state’s cause andthose who felt alienated from it. In the multinational empires, such rifts wereparticularly wide, given the failure of those states to sustain the levels of produc-tion and resource management attained by Germany, France, and Britain. Theyalso tended to coincide with ethno-cultural divisions, a factor that contributed tothe depth of the rifts. More specifically, the war exacerbated tensions betweenethnic groups that were closely identified with the imperial regimes or thatcommanded regional hegemony within the empires (Germans and Magyars inthe Habsburg empire, Russian settlers in Central Asia, Turks in the Ottomanempire) and those that felt consigned to the role of subject nationalities or

8 Conclusion

oppressed minorities. In some regions, differences of class and ethnicity coin-cided with and reinforced each other (Slovak peasants vs. Magyar landowningand political elites, Russian settlers and Kazakh nomads, Greek and Armeniancommercial classes vs. their economically less successful but politically morepowerful Turkish rivals). But ethnic groups with a high degree of internal classdifferentiation could also feel collectively exploited by other nationalities (Czechsby Germans). Even in cases where socio-economic differences created deep polit-ical fissures within a nationality (Croat urban classes vs. Croat peasants), ethnicdifference (e.g. between Croat and Serb peasants) tended to hinder the buildingof truly internationalist, class-based movements.

At the same time, the framework of the war created opportunities for small,highly motivated groups of nationalist mavericks to form exile organizations andvolunteer legions that played on the conflict among the Great Powers to advancetheir causes. The Great Powers themselves lent refuge and support to various ofthese movements as instruments of subversion against their rivals or as fig leavesof legitimization for their occupation of enemy territory and for their annexa-tionist designs. The phrase “national self-determination” dominated thevocabulary of propaganda and legitimization among liberation movements andimperial powers alike.

Among the exile organizations and volunteer legions that helped shape thevictorious Allied and Associated Powers’ vision of a postwar settlement and/orthat managed to gain power in their homelands in 1918, the predominantconceptions of nationhood were those that sought to root a state-centered polit-ical identity in a sense of ethno-cultural community by stretching the definitionof the latter to its limits – or beyond. Czechoslovakism, Yugoslavism, Piłsudski’svision of a Polish-led, multinational federation – each of these nation-buildingprojects was intended to complement a priori territorial aspirations based onstrategic considerations or historical precedents. Arab nationalists transposed theexpansive, virtually borderless spirit of the Islamic umma or of Ottomanism totheir vision of nationhood. The cultivation of popular identities more or lesscongruent with such states’ territorial expanses was to be achieved by building onthe common denominators among the polities’ major linguistic, religious, orregional communities – or, alternatively, through ethnic cleansing and forcedassimilation. (The Western powers’ imposition of minorities treaties was itselflargely motivated by a desire to promote long-term political and cultural integra-tion of the new or enlarged states – as was their reluctance to enforce the treatiesas soon as the intractable nature of minorities problems became apparent.)1

Conversely, the Soviet regime set out to reify ethnic identities with a view totransforming them into conduits for the propagation of a common, suprana-tional Soviet identity. Each of these visions was more a program for thetransformation of mass consciousness than a direct response to popular demand.Such programs did tap into the eagerness for political independence thatgripped broad sectors of the populace. But popular notions of who constitutedthe nation, what the role of the state should be in land redistribution or socialreform, and how independence would transform the exercise of political

Conclusion 219

authority and the relations among classes, were usually quite different from thoseentertained by the newly empowered nationalist elites.

From the moment the new states were founded, therefore, there was ayawning gulf between the official nationalist synthesizing projects that had beencatapulted into the role of authoritative ideologies and the highly compartmen-talized, ethnonational consciousness that prevailed among the general populaceand that had been enhanced by the war. The Croat rural population was drawnto the idea of a Croat peasant republic rather than to the grand Yugoslav design.The Slovak masses had little knowledge of, let alone interest in, the Czechoslovakideal in which a handful of liberal Slovak intellectuals placed such great store.The basic communities of collective interest and action in many parts of theMiddle East remained confessional, clan-based, or ethno-religious (Maronites,Druze) in nature, and, for many of these groups, the embrace of pan-Arabnationalism – or opposition to it – was essentially a means of protecting orenhancing their position vis-à-vis rival communities and of forming alliances withurban elites or mandatory authorities.

The process of establishing states, consolidating their authority, and fixingtheir frontiers further muddied these already murky waters. Internecine warfareamong states with disputed frontiers did not create propitious conditions for theinculcation of tolerance or the cultivation of trans-ethnic cultural syntheses. Thepersistence of old elites or elements of their political culture in positions ofpower within the new regimes contributed to a conflict between democratic-populist rhetoric and authoritarian practices on the part of ruling circles in EastCentral Europe and the Middle East. The struggle by these regimes to maintainpolitical control and cultivate some measure of popular support in the face ofthese tensions and contradictions, and in the midst of the often gruelingeconomic hardships of the interwar years, reinforced the tendency to stigmatizeand scapegoat minorities. The distinction between liberal and right-wing formsof nationalism, which had seemed quite clear-cut among a number of nation-alist intelligentsias before the war, was steadily eroded, as ostensiblyliberal-democratic elites resorted to policies that were functionally equivalent tothe ethno-chauvinism espoused by their critics. This only served to create anatmosphere conducive to the rise of a new generation of radically right-wing,populist or quasi-fascist nationalists who pointed to the inconsistencies and self-contradictions of the first generation of nationalist elites and promised to replacetheir wishy-washy brand of politics with a purer, unapologetic, uncompromisingform of ethnic chauvinism that would transcend the bitter class conflicts of theDepression era, empower the masses, and turn them loose against the nation’senemies, internal and external.

Several patterns emerge from this welter of information. One is that nationalidentities were not simply prefabricated by intellectual or socio-political elitesand then transmitted to “the masses” in a streamlined process of nation-stateformation. Rather, diverse frameworks of collective action and identity, rangingfrom London-based national committees to rural rebellions and social banditry,suddenly converged in 1918 amidst the collapse of the imperial edifices. Under

220 Conclusion

the new, post-imperial dispensation, the politics of nationalism were shaped bythe struggle to fit divergent forms and conceptions of identity into unidimen-sional packages called nation-states (or Soviet socialist republics). Newly installedregimes had to find ways of either co-opting or suppressing the various social,regional, and ethnic identities prevalent in the territories over which theyclaimed control. Official nationalisms were unavoidably shaped by the ethnona-tional identities they sought to build on, while shaping them in turn. In the caseof marginalized or oppressed minorities, a negative dialectic between state-promoted and popular identities prevailed. The very abruptness of the transitionto independence accentuated these dilemmas and exacerbated the resultantconflicts.

It may seem that the circumstances surrounding the events of these yearswere so unusual, and the span of time addressed by this book so short, that thisstory can have no broader, theoretical implications. But it was precisely duringthis brief period of explosive change that long-term ideological, cultural, andinstitutional patterns – and the conflicts and contradictions inherent in them –crystallized. The events of 1914–1923 set much of the agenda for the politics ofnationalism in these regions for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond.Moreover, this pattern of development – a relatively long phase of nationalistfermentation and intermittent political agitation and popular unrest followed bya sudden, almost unanticipated plunge into independence in the context of ageneral imperial collapse – is rather typical of the way nation-states have comeinto being, as post-1945 decolonization in Asia and Africa and events in EasternEurope and the Soviet Union after 1989 suggest.2 In many cases, therefore,studying the transition from nationalism as movement to nationalism as regime3

may be critical to understanding long-term patterns of identity politics in post-imperial nation-states. Many theoretical studies of nationalism tend to overlookor underemphasize this vital point, so focussed are they on the incrementalimpact of social, economic, and cultural change in the modern world.

This study also seems to suggest that ethnic chauvinism was heavily overdeter-mined as the outcome of nationalist development in the great majority of cases.The most liberal and democratic attempts to reconcile ethnic identity with abroader, more inclusive, civic consciousness – such as Masaryk’sCzechoslovakism – ended in policies that smacked of cultural imperialism andthat alienated minorities. One of the most successful experiments in forging anew civic consciousness – Kemal Atatürk’s Turkish nationalism – rested on ruth-lessly authoritarian practices and on the stubborn equation of civic identity withassimilation into Turkish culture as defined by the state. In fact, whether thisendeavor should be considered a long-term success even in terms of its ownsocially integrative priorities is debatable, given the resulting alienation of a largeportion of the Kurdish population.

But to conclude that ethnicity is an atavistic phenomenon that must have norole in the forging of modern, liberal, national identity, or that there simply canbe no such thing as liberal nationalism under any circumstances, would bepremature. The problem with many of the political projects discussed in this

Conclusion 221

book was that they pushed too hard for a perfect fit between ethnic and civicidentities. Some of the most liberally minded nationalist thinkers and leadersdiscussed in this volume were convinced that national identity had to be shapedso as to conform perfectly to a preconceived notion of the centralized, modernstate, characterized by the uniform distribution of its authority throughout itsterritory and governed in the name of an indivisible popular sovereignty.4

Mutatis mutandis, Leninist nationality policy was intended to contribute to theeventual erosion of nationalist sentiments and emergence of an undifferentiated,class-based and state-centered identity.

What I am suggesting is that nationalism is fueled and shaped by the intersec-tion of political and economic modernization (the emergence of the centralizedstate and the idea of popular sovereignty, the spread of literacy, the onset ofindustrialization or of the aspiration to industrialize) with the perennial humanpsychological and emotional need for a communal framework of identity. Withthe possible exception of culturally homogeneous (relatively speaking) societiessuch as Japan, nationalism is not fully congruent with the logic of the stream-lined modern state, and it certainly lends itself to horrific abuses, but neither canthe state function entirely without it. Yael Tamir has developed an elegant argu-ment to the effect that the liberal democratic form of the modern state is no lessdependent on a sense of national identity for its functioning than its autocraticor intolerant counterparts. The self-interest alone of the individual “rationalactor” is not sufficient to maintain political cohesion and a commitment tocommon values in a liberal society; some shared sense of identity is indispens-able. By the same token, the very existence of borders betweenliberal-democratic states suggests that their political identities are not coextensivewith all humanity, but circumscribed by the boundaries of nationhood.Conversely, Tamir argues, an individual’s identity is shaped by the sense ofbelonging to a cultural community, and the public – perhaps even political –expression of collective identity can thus be construed as an individual right,which squares nationalism with liberalism’s focus on the rights of the individual.5

How then to reconcile cultural diversity with political cohesion? Tamir’sconcluding vision of an ethno-culturally neutral, supranational framework ofpolitical sovereignty within which a menagerie of national identities could peace-fully coexist (in the spirit of the European Union (EU)) contradicts her earlierargument to the effect that a liberal state’s political cohesion depends on itssociety’s sense of shared national identity. In a sense, she falls into the same trapas the liberal nationalists of the First World War era – the belief that the struc-ture of the modern state, the institutions of electoral democracy, and thecontours of national identity can all be made to fit perfectly together, like thepieces of a puzzle.

It was Isaiah Berlin (Tamir’s mentor, and himself a proponent of liberalnationalism) who pointed out that many of the values we hold most dear – suchas liberty and equality, or individual freedom and collective sovereignty – areinherently in tension with one another. Having more of one inescapably meanshaving less of the other, and no one can prove conclusively where the perfect

222 Conclusion

balance may lie.6 Liberal nationalism is a contradiction in terms – but that doesnot invalidate it. A completely and consistently liberal society devoid of anysense of national identity would lack political cohesion and would, for thatmatter, have no borders. States in which the cult of national identity serves as theexclusive source of political legitimacy unfortunately abound in the real world,with consequences that need not be elaborated upon here. To accommodateboth liberalism and nationalism within the bounds of a polity requires a readi-ness to recognize that there exists tension between the two principles and awillingness to accept a certain degree of conceptual and institutional messinessand inconsistency as a consequence. Pre-existing ethnic identities cannot bestitched together overnight into new national patterns that neatly conform to theterritorial configuration of the state. Nor should ethnic or regional identities thatfail to conform to the integrative proclivities of the state be dismissed, let alonesuppressed, as incompatible with an a priori conception of modern, state-centered, civic nationalism. Imaginative compromises and idiosyncraticimprovisations – be they in the form of border adjustments, power-sharingagreements, regional autonomy, extraterritorial autonomy, shared sovereigntyover contested territories – provide the best means of squaring the circle. Most ofthe regimes that came to power amidst bloodshed and destitution in the wake ofthe First World War lacked either the inclination or the opportunity to approachthe problem in this spirit. In this sense, the EU does in fact offer an invaluableframework for experimenting with new, flexible notions of sovereignty that canmore readily mediate the tension between humans’ need for cooperation andtheir drive to define themselves by what sets them apart.7 Whether such ideasgain acceptance, either in Europe or in the rest of the world, remains an openquestion.

Conclusion 223

1 Introduction

1 On the relationship between nationalism and liberalism, see in particular LiahGreenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1992) and Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 1993). For works that explore nationalism as an aspect or function of socio-economic, cultural, and political modernity, see Karl Deutsch, Nationalism and SocialCommunication. An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality (Cambridge, MA: The MITPress, 1966); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversityPress, 1983); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth,Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Eric Hobsbawm and TerenceRanger, eds, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983);John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press,1982); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (rev. edn, London and New York:Verso, 1991; 1983). For a recent critique of the modernist interpretation of nation-alism, see Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion andNationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Anthony Smith hasexplored the pre-modern roots of modern nationalism as well as the role of ethno-nationalism as a force that both reflects the conflict between, and reconciles, theimpersonal and alienating aspects of modernization and defensive, neo-romanticreactions against it. Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell,1986); idem, Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press,1979), chap. 7. On nationalism as a backlash against the bureaucratic state, see alsoIsaiah Berlin, “The Bent Twig: On the Rise of Nationalism,” in idem, The CrookedTimber of Humanity (New York: Vintage, 1992), 238–261.

2 Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis ofthe Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations (New York:Cambridge University Press, 1985).

3 On the need to integrate the role of historical contingency and of the historical eventinto the theoretical study of nationalism, see Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed:Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996), chap. 1: “Nation as Form, Category, Event.”

4 On the need to develop comparative perspectives on nationalism, see PeterStearns, “Nationalisms: An Invitation to Comparative Analysis,” Journal of WorldHistory, vol. 8, no. 1 (1997), 57–74.

5 See Seamus Dunn and T.G. Fraser, eds, The First World War and Contemporary EthnicConflict (London: Routledge, 1996).

6 See Greenfeld, Nationalism; Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France andGermany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); George Schöpflin,“Nationalism, Politics and the European Experience,” Survey, 28 (4) (Winter 1984),

Notes

67–86; idem, “Nationalism and Ethnicity in Europe, East and West,” in CharlesKupchan, ed., Nationalism and Nationalities in the New Europe (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 1995). For early typological and historical distinctions betweenliberal and illiberal forms of nationalism, see Carlton Hayes, The Historical Evolution ofModern Nationalism (New York: R.R. Smith, 1931); Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism:A Study in its Origins and Background (New York: Macmillan, 1944), chaps 6–8; idem, TheAge of Nationalism: The First Era of Global History (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), partI; Nationalism: A Report by a Study Group of Members of the Royal Institute of InternationalAffairs (London: Frank Cass, 1963; 1st edn, 1939), chaps 2–4.

7 See Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” in CharlesTilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1975).

8 A classic statement of this thesis is to be found in Ernest Renan’s March 1882Sorbonne lecture, “What is a Nation?” translated by Martin Thom and reprinted inGeoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds, Becoming National: A Reader (New York:Oxford University Press, 1996). For a critical view of the French Third Republic’srole in the cultural homogenization of rural France, see Eugen Weber, Peasants intoFrenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, CA: StanfordUniversity Press, 1976), esp. 112–114.

9 Karen Barkey also makes this point in “Thinking about Consequences of Empire,” inKaren Barkey and Mark von Hagen, eds, After Empire – Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires (Boulder, CO:Westview Press, 1997). See also Rasma Karklins, Ethnopolitics and Transition toDemocracy: The Collapse of the USSR and Latvia (Washington, DC: Woodrow WilsonCenter Press and Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 44–47.

10 See Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (discussed in Chapter 8 of this book).11 There are no completely standardized definitions for any of these terms. For discus-

sions of such terminological problems, see Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism: The Questfor Understanding (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), chap. 4; Greenfeld,Nationalism, 3–14; Aira Kemiläinen, “The Idea of Nationalism,” Scandinavian Journal ofHistory, vol. 9, no. 1 (1984), 31–64.

2 Ethnicity and Empire: An Historical Introduction

1 See Dominic Lieven’s useful comparative analysis in “The Russian Empire and theSoviet Union as Imperial Polities,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 30, no. 4(October 1995), 607–636. See also the older treatment by Hugh Seton-Watson,Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism(Boulder, CO: Westview, 1977), chap. 4.

2 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983),62.

3 See Steven Beller, Francis Joseph (London: Longman, 1996).4 The German word for Austria is Österreich, meaning “eastern realm” (of the Holy

Roman empire).5 Robert A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918 (Berkeley and Los

Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1974), chaps 1–3 and pp. 156–170.6 Kann, Habsburg, 218–221.7 For convenience sake, I will continue to use the terms Habsburg empire and Austria–

Hungary interchangeably.8 A unitary Reichsrat had been created under the February Patent of 1861. In the

wake of its mitosis in 1867, a committee consisting of delegations from both parlia-ments met regularly to decide upon joint appropriations for military and foreignaffairs.

9 Information on nineteenth-century developments in the Habsburg empire is drawnfrom: Kann, Habsburg, 332–342; Robert A. Kann, The Multinational Empire: Nationalism

Notes 225

and National Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy (New York: Columbia University Press,1950), vol. 1, chap. 4; Alan Sked, The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire,1815–1918 (London: Longman, 1989), chap. 5; Samuel R. Williamson, Jr,Austria–Hungary and the Origins of the First World War (New York: St. Martin’s Press,1991), chap. 2.

10 Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,1984), 91–93.

11 The Ukrainians of Galicia and Bukovina were called Ruthenians. I will employ theterm ‘Ukrainian’ in reference to them, since linguistically they were virtually indistin-guishable from the Ukrainians of the Russian empire, and since the youngergeneration of their nationalist leaders advocated the cultivation of national bondswith Russia’s Ukrainians. The Galician Ukrainians were adherents of the Uniate(Eastern Rite Catholic) Church, in contrast to their predominantly Orthodox co-ethnics across the Russian border.

12 Sked, Decline, 213.13 Beller, Francis Joseph, 140–189 and passim; Sked, Decline, 218–234; Carl E. Schorske,

Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1981), 120–133. For acritique of the Habsburgs’ anachronistic and paternalistic dynasticism, the hollownessof Austrian civic education, the ethno-cultural chauvinism of Hungarian civic educa-tion, and the latent intolerance and extremism of minority nationalisms in theempire, see Oscar Jaszi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy (Chicago, IL:University of Chicago Press, 1961; 1929), parts IV–VII.

14 The Slovenes were also increasingly included in the designation South Slav.15 This discussion relies upon: Banac, The National Question, 76–80, 85–91, 110–111,

209–214; John Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1996), 43–46; Dimitrije Djordjevic, “The Idea ofYugoslav Unity in the Nineteenth Century,” in Dimitrije Djordjevic, ed., The Creationof Yugoslavia, 1914–1918 (Santa Barbara, CA and Oxford: Clio Press, 1980), 3; Kann,Habsburg, 384–405; Hugh and Christopher Seton-Watson, The Making of a New Europe:R.W. Seton-Watson and the Last Years of Austria–Hungary (Seattle, WA: University ofWashington Press, 1981), 58–59.

16 The most dramatic example of this phenomenon actually dates from 1846, when aszlachta-led Polish nationalist uprising in Galicia was defeated by mostly Polish peas-ants who slaughtered their hated masters in the name of the Habsburg Emperor.Lewis Namier, 1848: Revolution of the Intellectuals (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1992; reprint of text in Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 30, 1946), 12–17;Sked, Decline, 63–64.

17 One of the ironies of these programs of national revival was that their intellectualleaders were themselves often more comfortable speaking and writing the empire’shegemonic tongue than communicating in their own national language. Thus, thehistorian František Palacký, one of the architects of the nineteenth-century Czechcultural revival, did his early writing in German. Jonathan Sperber, The EuropeanRevolutions, 1848–1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 97.

18 Schorske, Vienna, 120–133.19 Kann, Multinational, vol. 1, chap. 3.20 This was the term used to distinguish peoples who were widely recognized as the

heirs to historic state traditions. Kann, Multinational, vol. 1, chap. 2.21 Robert B. Pynsent, Questions of Identity: Czech and Slovak Ideas of Nationality and Personality

(Budapest, London, and New York: Central European University Press, 1994),152–169.

22 The Uniate Church served as a focal point for Ukrainian nationalism in easternGalicia, with the currents of Russian Ukrainian populist nationalism beginning toripple across the border in the last decades before the First World War.

23 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 62; Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of NationalRevival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among

226 Notes

the Smaller European Nations (trans. from the Czech by Ben Fowkes, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1985), chap. 13 and pp. 139–147.

24 John F.N. Bradley, Czech Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Boulder, CO: EastEuropean Monographs, 1984), 24, 35, 53–54; Hans Kohn, Pan-Slavism: Its History andIdeology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1953), 184; Paul Vysny, Neo-Slavism and the Czechs: 1898–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977),23–26. The prototype for the Sokol movement was Turnvater Jahn’s early-nineteenth-century, German-nationalist, gymnastic organizations.

25 Bohemia’s large coal reserves contributed significantly to its late-nineteenth-centurytransformation into Austria’s industrial powerhouse. David F. Good, The Economic Riseof the Habsburg Empire, 1750–1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University ofCalifornia Press, 1984), 129–134.

26 Bradley, Czech Nationalism, 33–37; Kann, Habsburg, 439–441; Kann, Multinational,vol. 1, 205.

27 This discussion of Austro-Marxism draws on: Otto Bauer, Die Nationalitätenfrage und dieSozialdemokratie (Vienna: I. Brand, 1907), 23–95; extracts from Bauer’s and Renner’swritings in Tom Bottomore and Patrick Goode, trans. and eds, Austro-Marxism(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 102–117; Mark E. Blum, The Austro-Marxists,1890–1918 (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1985), chaps 3 and 5;Kann, Multinational, vol. 2, chap. 20.

28 Bauer, Die Nationalitätenfrage, 282–316; Bottomore and Good, Austro-Marxism, 102–107;Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1964), 24–26.

29 See Chapter 3.30 Bauer was an assimilated Jew and Renner an ethnic German.31 Kann, Multinational, vol. 1, chap. 5 and vol. 2, chap. 23; Sked, Decline, 208–234.32 Lieven, “The Russian Empire,” 623.33 Andreas Kappeler, Russland als Vielvölkerreich: Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall (Munich:

C.H. Beck, 1993), provides the definitive treatment of this theme. This section drawsextensively on his work.

34 Lieven, “The Russian Empire,” 624–625. There were exceptions to this pattern, suchas the autonomy of the Cossack Hetmanate according to the terms of the treaty thatbrought the Ukraine under the tsar’s protection in the seventeenth century, the consti-tutional distinctiveness of the Russian partition of Poland (Congress Poland), orFinnish autonomy following its acquisition from Sweden in 1808–1809. Such excep-tions were never allowed to last for long, however. Hans Rogger, Russia in the Age ofModernisation and Revolution, 1881–1917 (London: Longman, 1983), chap. 9.

35 Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (2nd edn; New York: Macmillan, 1992),chaps 2–4.

36 Ibid., chap. 5; Kappeler, Russland, chap. 4; Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and State in LateImperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863–1914 (DeKalb,IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996), 194–196.

37 Kappeler, Russland, 29–36. Marc Raeff argues that the co-optation of native elitesinto the tsarist nobility should be seen as an indirect form of Russification. See his“Uniformity, Diversity, and the Imperial Administration,” and “In the ImperialManner,” in Marc Raeff, Political Ideas and Institutions in Imperial Russia (Boulder, CO:Westview Press, 1994).

38 For a counter-example – the persecution of the Jews – see John Doyle Klier, ImperialRussia’s Jewish Question, 1855–1881 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (London:Macmillan, 1986).

39 Lieven, “The Russian Empire,” p. 629, no. 7.40 Kappeler, Russland, chap. 7.41 Michael Boro Petrovich, The Emergence of Russian Panslavism, 1856–1870 (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1956), 254–269; Kohn, Pan-Slavism, 137–175; Frank

Notes 227

Fadner, S.J. (The Society of Jesus – The Jesuit order), Seventy Years of Pan-Slavism inRussia: Karazin to Danilevskii, 1800–1870 (Haarlem, The Netherlands: GeorgetownUniversity Press, 1962), 293–301 and 314–349.

42 Weeks, Nation, 8; Nicholas P. Vakar, Belorussia: The Making of a Nation (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1956), 68–70; Kappeler, Russland, 189; Geoffrey Hosking,Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1997), part 4, chap. 3.

43 Hosking, Russia, 377, 380–385.44 Kappeler, Russland, chap. 7. On Russian government attitudes toward the pogroms,

see Rogger, Jewish, chap. 4; I. Michael Aronson, “The Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russiain 1881,” in John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, eds, Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence inModern Russian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

45 This mentality is more commonly associated with the Soviet era, but Peter Holquisthas found strong manifestations of it in the memoranda and reports of nineteenth-century tsarist military planners. See the introduction to Peter Holquist, “ ‘ConductMerciless Mass Terror’: Decossackization on the Don, 1919,” Cahiers du Monde Russe etSovietique, vol. 38, nos 1–2 (1997), 127–162.

46 Sir Bernard Pares, The Fall of the Russian Monarchy (New York: Knopf, 1939), 307–309;Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 1: The Old Army and theSoldiers’ Revolt (March–April 1917) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980),110–113; Lieven, “The Russian Empire,” 613; Hubertus Jahn, Patriotic Culture inRussia during World War I (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 171–177.Russia’s February Revolution occurred during March according to the (Western)Gregorian calendar, to which all dates in this book refer.

47 The Cossack tradition was romanticized and reified into an ideal expression ofhuman freedom by the mid nineteenth-century poet Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861),who played a central role in elevating the language of Ukrainian peasants into amedium of literary expression and who achieved the status of national bard. JohnReshetar, The Ukrainian Revolution, 1917–1920: A Study in Nationalism (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1952), 5–6.

48 The Grand Duchy of Lithuania’s union with Poland (dating to 1386 and confirmedas indissoluble in 1569) had led to the Polonization of its socio-political elites, whoseprevious medium of high-cultural expression had actually been Belorussian. RonaldGrigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the SovietUnion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 32–33.

49 Reshetar, Ukrainian, 146.50 Vakar, Belorussia, chap. 6.51 Finland’s autonomous status also created the foundation for a distinct political iden-

tity.52 Kappeler, Russland, 183–191.53 Henry J. Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia: From Its Origins to 1905 (Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press, 1972), 251–252.54 The Armenians had converted to Christianity in the fourth century AD. Ronald

Grigor Suny, Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Bloomington andIndianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), 8.

55 Ibid., chap. 2; Ronald Grigor Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation (2nd edn,Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 139–143.

56 This discussion of Russia’s Muslim populations draws upon: Kappeler, Russland,149–168; Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, Islam and the Russian Empire: Reform and Revolutionin Central Asia (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1988),chaps 2–4; Martha Brill Olcott, The Kazakhs (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press,1987), chaps 3–4; Steven Marks, Road to Power: The Trans-Siberian Railroad and theColonization of Asian Russia, 1850–1917 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991),162.

228 Notes

57 Z.A.B. Zeman, The Break-up of the Habsburg Empire 1914–1918: A Study in Social andNational Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), chap. 1; James Joll, TheOrigins of the First World War (2nd edn, London: Longman, 1992), 110–111; L.C.F.Turner, Origins of the First World War (New York: Norton, 1970), 80–81.

58 Constantinople became known to the Islamic world as Istanbul – a mispronunciationof the Greek phrase (eis ten polin) meaning “to the city.” The city continued to bereferred to as “Konstantiniyye” on coins and in official documents.

59 This discussion of the Ottoman empire draws upon: Stanford Shaw, History of theOttoman Empire and Modern Turkey. Volume 1: Empire of the Gazis: The Rise and Decline of theOttoman Empire, 1280–1808 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), chaps2–5; Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and ModernTurkey. Volume 2: Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808–1975(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 55–133, 157–158, 174–187, and255–259; Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London: Oxford UniversityPress, 1961), chaps 1–2; Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I.B. Tauris,1993), chaps 1, 5, 7–8.

60 The relationship between ethnicity and religion was highly fluid in the late Ottomanempire. In some cases, rising ethno-national consciousness divided religious commu-nities (most notably that of Sunni Islam). In other cases, nationalists aspired totranscend religious differences. Religious identity could itself become ethnicized.

61 Lieven, “The Russian Empire,” 613–614.62 The millet system may have served as a loose model for the Austro-Marxists’ concept

of extraterritorial autonomy (discussed above).63 Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking Toward Ararat, 98–106; Manoug Somakian, Empires in

Conflict: Armenia and the Great Powers 1895–1920 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995), 15–31.64 See, for instance, Philip Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of

Damascus 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), chaps 1–2;Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire, vol. 2, 221–245.

65 The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a NewIntroduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict by George F. Kennan (Washington, DC:Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, 1993), 155–157.

66 The case of the Serbo-Croatian-speaking Muslims left stranded in Bosnia afterOttoman withdrawal from the province in 1878 is particularly illuminating: manyMuslims almost arbitrarily designated themselves as Serbs or Croats, for want of anydistinctive national identity of their own. Banac, The National Question, 58–59, 66–67,362–366.

3 On the Eve of War: The Intelligentsia as Vanguard ofNationalism

1 Britain, France, and Germany constituted the most influential prototypes. After theRusso-Japanese war of 1904–1905, Japan was also the object of attention on the partof Central Asian and Turkish nationalists, as well as of the Polish nationalist, RomanDmowski.

2 The term “integral nationalism” refers to a chauvinistic, right-wing form of nation-alism that holds up the nation’s self-interest as an absolute value, to which all otherethical considerations and moral values are subordinate (or by which they areinformed).

3 This discussion of pre-war Polish politics draws upon the following works: AndrzejGarlicki, Józef Piłsudski, 1867–1935 (ed., trans., and abridged by John Coutouvidis,Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995); R.F. Leslie, Antony Polonsky, Jan M. Ciechanowski,and Z.A. Pelczynski, The History of Poland since 1863 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1980); Robert E. Blobaum, Rewolucja. Russian Poland, 1904–1907(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Piotr S. Wandycz, “Poland’s Place inEurope in the Concepts of Piłsudski and Dmowski,” East European Politics and Societies,

Notes 229

vol. 4, no. 3 (1990), 451–468; Adam Bromke, Poland’s Politics: Idealism vs. Realism(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); Alvin Marcus Fountain II, RomanDmowski: Party, Tactics, Ideology 1895–1907 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs,1980); Roman Dmowski, Problems of Central and Eastern Europe (London: privatelyprinted, July 1917); Wiktor Sukiennicki, East Central Europe during World War I: FromForeign Domination to National Independence (2 vols, Boulder, CO: East EuropeanMonographs, 1984), chap. 6; Magdalena Opalski and Israel Bartal, Poles and Jews. AFailed Brotherhood (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992), 105.

4 Gerd Linde, Die Deutsche Politik in Litauen im Ersten Weltkrieg (Wiesbaden: OttoHarrassowitz, 1965), 73.

5 Piłsudski’s older brother Bronisław, who was a student in St. Petersburg, wassentenced to fifteen years’ hard labor for his apparently deeper involvement in the1887 plot. Lenin’s older brother, Alexander Ulianov, was executed for his leading rolein the assassination attempt. Garlicki, Piłsudski, chap. 1.

6 Józeph Piłsudski, Joseph Piłsudski: The Memories of a Polish Revolutionary and Soldier, trans.and ed. D.R. Gillie (London: Faber & Faber, 1931), 16.

7 See article by Piłsudski entitled “Russia,” which appeared in Robotnik (“The Worker,”PPS party organ) in 1895, as quoted in Garlicki, Piłsudski, 22.

8 Letter from Piłsudski to Feliks Perl, as quoted in Garlicki, Piłsudski, 59.9 The Endecja capitalized (so to speak) on workers’ disillusionment with socialist strike

efforts that failed to gain significant concessions from the government or the industri-alists. The National Democratic trade unions were in a position to use the Endecja’sindustrial connections to gain improved conditions for their members by means oflegal negotiation. Blobaum, Rewolucja, 194–195.

10 Stanley Winters, “The Young Czech Party (1874–1914): An Appraisal,” The SlavicReview, vol. 28 (1969), 426–444.

11 Joseph Kalvoda, The Genesis of Czechoslovakia (Boulder, CO: East EuropeanMonographs, 1986), 13–17; Paul Vyšný, Neo-Slavism and the Czechs: 1898–1914(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), chaps 3–7; J.F.N. Bradley, “CzechPan-Slavism before the First World War,” The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 40(1961–1962), 184–205 (esp. 193–197); Caspar Ferenczi, “Nationalismus undNeoslavismus in Russland vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” Forschungen zur osteuropäischenGeschichte, vol. 34 (1984), 7–127.

12 H. Gordon Skilling, T.G. Masaryk: Against the Current, 1882–1914 (University Park, PA:The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 6–7, 35–37, 101–103, and chap. 3;Robert Pynsent, Questions of Identity: Czech and Slovak Ideas of Nationality and Personality(Budapest: Central European University Press, 1994), 180–182; Kalvoda, Genesis ofCzechoslovakia, 17–32; Roman Szporluk, The Political Thought of Thomas G. Masaryk(Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1981), chap. 4. For a critique ofMasaryk’s attempt to conflate ethno-cultural and universalist themes, and for anattack on the elitist strain in his thinking, see Eva Schmidt-Hartmann, “The Fallacy ofRealism: Some Problems of Masaryk’s Approach to Czech National Aspirations,” inStanley B. Winters, ed., T.G. Masaryk (1850–1937), vol. 1 (New York: St. Martin’sPress, 1990). On Masaryk’s role in the manuscripts controversy – a highly politicizeddebate over the authenticity of what was alleged to be newly discovered medievalCzech epic poetry, but which Masaryk denounced as nineteenth-century forgeries –see Karel Čapek, Talks with T.G. Masaryk, trans. Dora Round and ed. Michael HenryHeim (North Haven, CT: Catbird Press, 1995), 120 and 133, 141–144 and trans-lator’s gloss on 251; Skilling, Masaryk, 4–6. On his relations with Jews and his publiccampaign on behalf of the accused in a turn-of-the-century anti-Semitic blood libel,see Steven Beller, “The Hilsner Affair: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism and the Individualin the Habsburg Monarchy at the Turn of the Century,” and Michael A. Riff, “TheAmbiguity of Masaryk’s Attitudes on the ‘Jewish Question’,” in Robert B. Pynsent,ed., T.G. Masaryk (1850–1937), vol. 2, Thinker and Critic (London: Macmillan, 1989);Skilling, Masaryk, 81–86.

230 Notes

13 This discussion of Slovak nationalism and its relationship to Masaryk draws uponPeter Petro, A History of Slovak Literature (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press,1995), 94–104; Thomas D. Marzik, “The Slovakophile Relationship of T.G. Masarykand Karel Kalal prior to 1914,” in Winters, Masaryk; Skilling, Masaryk, 73–75;Szporluk, Political Thought, 19–24, 139; Čapek, Talks, 52, 57, 169, 171.

14 The Hlasists were named for their original flagship journal, Hlas (meaning “Voice”).15 Naturally, the notion that the Slovak peasantry was so much clay waiting to be

molded in the Czechs’ image was to provoke bitter resentment on the part of manySlovaks during the interwar years.

16 This discussion of South Slav nationalism relies heavily upon Ivo Banac, The NationalQuestion in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,1984), 94–99. It also draws on the following sources: Nicholas J. Miller, Between Nationand State: Serbian Politics in Croatia before the First World War (Pittsburgh, PA: University ofPittsburgh Press, 1997), 30–33, 46–52, and chap. 6; Hugh and Christopher Seton-Watson, The Making of a New Europe: R.W. Seton-Watson and the Last Years ofAustria–Hungary (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1981), chap. 3; Hughand Christopher Seton-Watson, Ljubo Boban, Mirjana Gross, Bogdan Krizman, andDragovan Šepić, eds, R.W. Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs: Correspondence, 1906–1941.Vol. 1: 1906–1918 (London: British Academy, 1976), “Introduction” (pp. 12–13);Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans, Vol. 1: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 98–99; John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia asHistory: Twice There Was a Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),77–79; Ivo Banac, “Ministration and Desecration: The Place of Dubrovnik inModern Croat National Ideology and Political Culture,” in Ivo Banac, John G.Ackerman, and Roman Szporluk, eds, Nation and Ideology: Essays in Honor of Wayne S.Vucinich (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1981).

17 The influence of Russian populism is also clearly evident in Radić’s political thought.18 Miller, Between Nation and State, 137–140, 154–155, 159; Milorad Ekmecic, “Serbian

War Aims,” in Dimitrije Djordjević, ed., The Creation of Yugoslavia 1914–1918 (SantaBarbara, CA and Oxford, England: Clio Press, 1980), 26–27; Hugh and ChristopherSeton-Watson, Making of a New Europe, 68–70; Banac, The National Question, 99–104;Robert Seton-Watson to Ivo Lupis-Vukić (17 October 1909), Smodlaka to Seton-Watson (2 May 1912), Lupis-Vukić to Seton-Watson (15 November 1912), andSeton-Watson to Lupis-Vukić (27 November 1912) in Hugh and Christopher Seton-Watson, Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs, 50–54, 109, and 117–120. Various attempts byleading Serb and Croat linguists and writers to agree on a common alphabet orcommon subdialect as the basis for a unitary Yugoslav literary language ended infailure. Banac, The National Question, 209–214; Dimitrije Djordjević, “The Idea ofYugoslav Unity,” in idem, ed., Creation, note 11.

19 Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1997), 146–147.

20 Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russificationon the Western Frontier, 1863–1914 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press,1996), 30–40, chap. 9, and passim; Ferenczi, “Nationalismus und Neoslavismus,”39–40. On the Russian Right’s anti-Semitism and its connections to the infamous“Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” see Steven G. Marks, The Russian Century(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), chap. 5.

21 This discussion of moderate and left-wing party positions on the nationalities ques-tion draws on Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism andNationalism, 1917–1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 29–41;Weeks, Nation, 21–30. On the realpolitisch approach of Peter Struve, one of Russia’sleading liberal thinkers, to the nationalities issue, see Ferenczi, “Nationalismus undNeoslavismus,” 16–26; Richard Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Right, 1905–1944(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 88–94; Hosking, Russia, 446–448;Weeks, Nation, 27–29.

Notes 231

22 Cf. Mark Von Hagen, “Writing the History of Russia as Empire: The Perspective ofFederalism,” in Catherine Evtuhov, Boris Gasparov, Alexander Ospovat, and MarkVon Hagen, eds, Kazan, Moscow, St. Petersburg: Multiple Faces of the Russian Empire(Moscow: OGI, 1997).

23 The national poet, Taras Shevchenko, was among the founders of this society, whichwas broken up by the tsarist authorities soon after its establishment in 1846, butwhich left its mark on later Ukrainian movements.

24 John Reshetar, The Ukrainian Revolution, 1917–1920: A Study in Nationalism (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952), 6–9; Thomas M. Prymak, Mykhailo Hrushevsky:The Politics of National Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 7–8, 27;Ivan Rudnytsky, “The Fourth Universal and its Ideological Antecedents,” in TarasHunczak, ed., The Ukraine, 1917–1921: A Study in Revolution (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1977), 188–204; Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, The Great Challenge:Nationalities and the Bolshevik State, 1917–1930 (New York and London: Holmes &Meier, 1992), 19–22. The idea of reorganizing the tsarist empire as a democraticfederation of nations had been broached by Alexander Herzen (1812–1870), theintellectual father of Russian populism. See Adam Ulam, In the Name of the People:Prophets and Conspirators in Prerevolutionary Russia (New York: Viking Press, 1977), chap.2; Frank Fadner, S.J. (Society of Jesus – The Jesuit order), Seventy Years of Pan-Slavism inRussia: Karazin to Danilevskii, 1800–1870 (Haarlem, The Netherlands: GeorgetownUniversity Press, 1962), 170–182.

25 On the anti-Habsburg, “Old Ruthenian” movement of conservative, RussophileUkrainians in Galicia, see Zbynek Zeman, The Break-up of the Habsburg Empire,1914–1918 (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), chap. 1.

26 Prymak, Hrushevsky, 98–102.27 The expropriations were rescinded during the 1905 Revolution. Richard G.

Hovannisian, Armenia on the Road to Independence, 1918 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA:University of California Press, 1969), 17–21.

28 Ibid., 21–22; Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History(Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), chaps 4–5;Anahide Ter Minassian, “Nationalism and Socialism in the Armenian RevolutionaryMovement (1887–1912),” in Ronald Grigor Suny, ed., Transcaucasia, Nationalism andSocial Change: Essays in the History of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia (rev. edn, Ann Arbor,MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996; 1983). The Dashnaks’ main rival was theHnchak (“Bell” – thus named in honor of Alexander Herzen’s famous journal) Party,which also espoused a blend of socialism, populism, and nationalism, but with aslightly heavier emphasis on the socialist component. Internal splits in the partyduring the late 1890s left the Dashnaks with a virtual monopoly over the Armeniannationalist movement.

29 Pipes, Formation, chap. 1 and pp. 55–56; Hovannisian, Armenia on the Road toIndependence, 16–17.

30 The classic exposition of this argument was laid out by the Marxist Zionist BerBorochov, who contended that anti-Semitism had prevented Jews from developing a“normal” class structure in the diaspora, and that their establishment of a new societyin Palestine was the only way to rectify this anomaly. Ber Borochov, excerpt from“Our Platform,” in Arthur Hertzberg, ed., The Zionist Idea (New York: The JewishPublication Society of America, 1959), 360–366.

31 Henry J. Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia: From Its Origins to 1905 (Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press, 1972), chap. 7, pp. 127–130, 136–138, chaps 13 and 16,pp. 248–254, and passim.

32 Ronald Grigor Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation (2nd edn, Bloomington andIndianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), chap. 7.

33 Ibid., p. 145.34 See Chapter 2, pp. 16–18.35 Pipes, Formation, 27–28, 41–49; d’Encausse, The Great Challenge, 22–25.

232 Notes

36 Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1983 edn), chaps 5–7; John L. Esposito, Islam and Politics (Syracuse,NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 46–52; Hisham Sharabi, Arab Intellectuals and theWest: The Formative Years, 1875–1914 (Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns HopkinsPress, 1970). A very similar Islamic modernist philosophy was also articulated by theIndian Muslim Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), whose smuggled-in writings were avidlyread by the nascent Muslim intelligentsia of Russian-controlled Central Asia. SeeEsposito, Islam and Politics, 52–56; Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: ReligiousSymbolism and Political Mobilization in India (New York: Columbia University Press), 6–8,14–24; Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, Islam and the Russian Empire: Reform and Revolution inCentral Asia (trans. Quintin Hoare, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University ofCalifornia Press, 1988), 56–58.

37 This discussion of the Jadids draws upon: Pipes, Formation, 13–15; d’Encausse, Islamand the Russian Empire, chap. 5; Jacob M. Landau, Pan-Turkism: From Irredentism toCooperation (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 9–12;Tadeusz Swietochoswki, Russian Azerbaijan, 1905–1920: The Shaping of National Identityin a Muslim Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 31–33.

38 In some Turkestani cities, such as Bukhara and Samarkand, Farsi was widelyemployed as a spoken language. Edward Allworth, The Modern Uzbeks: From theFourteenth Century to the Present: A Cultural History (Stanford, CA: Hoover InstitutionPress, 1990), 38.

39 Erik Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I.B. Tauris, 1993), 100–104; HasanKayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire,1908–1918 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 72–74, 130–134.

40 See Chapter 2.41 Atatürk had a personal falling out with the CUP leaders and presented himself as a

radical alternative to them, but recent historical research has clearly demonstratedthat most of his policies can be understood as selected Young Turk conceptions takento their logical conclusions. Zürcher, Turkey, 180–181.

42 The name “Committee of Union and Progress” was derived from Auguste Comte’smotto, “order and progress.” See M. Șükrü Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in Opposition(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 74. This discussion of pre-1908 CUPpolitics draws heavily on Hanioğlu’s pathbreaking work.

43 See Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (London: T.F. Unwin,1896).

44 As quoted in Hanioğlu, Young Turks, 194.45 Zürcher, Turkey, 92–93.46 For the sake of consistency, I will employ the (original) Arabic version of this term

throughout. The Turkish version is ümmet.47 Uriel Heyd, Foundations of Turkish Nationalism: The Life and Teachings of Ziya Gökalp

(London: Luzac & Company and the Harvill Press, 1950), 55; Hanioğlu, Young Turks,chap. 9.

48 The use of the term millet to denote the Western concept of nation had been intro-duced in the mid-nineteenth century by Namik Kemal, a prominent figure among theempire’s first generation of modern political dissidents, the Young Ottomans.Zürcher, Turkey, 71–72.

49 This discussion of Gökalp draws upon: Heyd, Foundations of Turkish Nationalism,part II, pp. 55–70 and chap. 5, and part III, chap. 2; Niyazi Berkes, trans. and ed.,Turkish Nationalism and Western Civilization: Selected Essays of Ziya Gökalp (New York:Columbia University Press, 1959), 137–138, 259–262; Ahmet Emin Yalman,Turkey in the World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1930), 190.

50 It is interesting in this context to note that Dmowski spoke at a convocation of nation-alist organizations organized by Ahmed Riza in The Hague during the Hague PeaceConference of 1899. Fountain, Dmowski, 112–113; Hanioğlu, The Young Turks,128–129.

Notes 233

51 The idea of Asian racial superiority was given impetus by the Japanese victory overRussia in the 1904–1905 war. Hanioğlu, The Young Turks, 210.

52 Landau, Pan-Turkism, 32–33.53 From Mehmet Emin Yurdakul’s poem “Wake up, Oh Turk,” published in a 1918

collection but composed some years earlier, as quoted in Landau, Pan-Turkism, 32.54 Ibid., 38–39.55 Masami Arai, Turkish Nationalism in the Young Turk Era (Leiden: Brill, 1992), chap. 4.56 Zürcher, Turkey, 93–94.57 Erik Zürcher, The Unionist Factor: The Role of the Committee of Union and Progress in the

Turkish National Movement, 1905–1926 (Leiden: Brill, 1984), 49–51; Reeva S. Simon,Iraq between the Two World Wars: The Creation and Implementation of a Nationalist Ideology(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), chap. 2.

58 Zürcher, Turkey, 126–133; Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of theOttoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1977), 305–309. For an exploration of the tension between ethnic Turkish nation-alism and liberal Ottomanism within the intellectual circles of the Young Turksbetween 1908 and 1914, see Arai, Turkish Nationalism, chaps 1, 3–4, and Conclusion.

59 Manoug J. Somakian, Empires in Conflict: Armenia and the Great Powers 1895–1920(London: I.B. Tauris, 1995), 40–44. In February 1914, under Great Power pressure,the Ottoman government reluctantly agreed to an internationally supervised adminis-trative reform plan for the Armenian provinces. This agreement was neverimplemented. Ibid., 57–63.

60 Hasan Kayalı (Arabs and Young Turks) argues that, taken as a whole, the public policiesof the Young Turks did not reflect a preconceived Turkish nationalist agenda, butrather a centralizing form of Ottomanism. Insofar as this led the CUP regime topropagate the use of the Turkish language in the administration and educationalsystems of Arab regions, and to ride roughshod over certain local interests, a backlashwas inevitable. But he contends that the portrayal of the CUP as a Turkish nationalistmovement was a propaganda device employed by their decentralist opponents (advo-cates of greater regional autonomy) in the Arab world. However, research into theprivate correspondence of the CUP’s leadership by scholars such as Zürcher andHanioğlu suggests that there was more than a grain of truth to this propaganda line.In any event, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that centralist Ottomanism was func-tionally bound to lead to Turkish nationalism.

61 Hanioğlu, The Young Turks, 44–49; idem, “The Young Turks and the Arabs before theRevolution of 1908,” in Rashid Khalidi, Lisa Anderson, Muhammad Muslih, andReeva S. Simon, eds, The Origins of Arab Nationalism (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1991); Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 2,309–310.

62 Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks, 34, 107.63 Ibid., chap. 5 and pp. 106, 132, 140–141, 179–180, 187; Hanna Batatu, The Old Social

Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and CommercialClasses and of its Communists, Ba‘thists, and Free Officers (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1978), 171–172.

64 Al-‘Ahd had a large number of junior military officers from Mesopotamia – many ofthem of lower-middle-class background – among its members.

65 Eliezer Tauber, The Arab Movements in World War I (London: Frank Cass, 1993), 113.66 Philip Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus 1860–1920

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), chap. 3; Ernest Dawn, “The Originsof Arab Nationalism,” and Rashid Khalidi, “Ottomanism and Arabism in Syriabefore 1914: A Reassessment,” in Khalidi et al., Origins of Arab Nationalism; Sharabi,Arab Intellectuals, 121–128; Bassam Tibi, Arab Nationalism: Between Islam and the Nation-State (3rd edn, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 109–114; Hourani, Arabic Thought,280–285; Zeine N. Zeine, Arab–Turkish Relations and the Emergence of Arab Nationalism

234 Notes

(Beirut: Khayat’s, 1958), chap. 5; Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks, chap. 4 and pp. 69–70,174–181.

67 There were also Christian writers from Lebanon and Syria who, during the last thirdof the nineteenth century, espoused a secular vision of Syrian and/or Arab nation-alism as a framework within which religious minorities could take their place asequals alongside the Sunni Muslim majority in the Arab Middle East. GeorgeAntonius, The Arab Awakening (New York: Paragon Books, 1979; 1st edn, London,1938), 45–60; Hourani, Arabic Thought, 273–279; Tibi, Arab Nationalism, 96–105. Theirinfluence on the development of Arabism and Arab nationalism is no longer thoughtto have been as profound as George Antonius suggested in his influential 1938 book(cited above). For an insightful dissection of Antonius’ work as an exercise in nation-alist historiography, propaganda, and mythmaking, see William L. Cleveland, “TheArab Nationalism of George Antonius Reconsidered,” in James Jankowski and IsraelGershoni, eds, Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1997). See also Albert Hourani, “The Arab Awakening Forty YearsAfter,” in Albert Hourani, The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (Berkeley, CA:University of California Press, 1981).

68 C. Ernest Dawn, From Ottomanism to Arabism: Essays on the Origins of Arab Nationalism(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 143–147.

69 Egypt had been under British control since 1882, and was thus beyond the reach ofthe Ottoman authorities.

70 Rashid Rida, “Al-‘Arab wa al-Turk” (The Arabs and the Turks), al-Manar (Cairo),vol. 12 (1909) as reprinted in Yusuf Husayn Ibish and Yusuf Quzma Khuri, eds,Maqalat al-Shaykh Rashid Rida al-siyasiyyah (The political essays of Sheikh RashidRida), vol. 2 (Beirut: Dar Ibn Arabi, 1994), 648–649.

71 Ibid., 642; Malcolm H. Kerr, Islamic Reform: The Political and Legal Theories of Muhammad‘Abduh and Rashid Rida (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966), 166–175;Hourani, Arabic Thought, 303–306.

72 Another Syrian expatriate in Cairo, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (1849–1903),took the nationalist implications of Rida’s ideas a step further by calling openly forthe transfer of the caliphate to the Arabs. See Dawn, From Ottomanism to Arabism,84–85, 138–143; Hourani, Arabic Thought, chaps 6, 9; Sharabi, Arab Intellectuals,102–104; Sylvia Haim, “Intorno alle origini della teoria del panarabismo,” OrienteModerno, vol. 35, no. 7 (July 1956), 409–421; Sylvia Haim, ed., Arab Nationalism: AnAnthology (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1962),16–29. Sylvia Haim has suggested that al-Kawakibi’s idea of an Arab caliphatemay have reflected the influence of the British Arabist Wilfrid Blunt’s writingsrather than being a purely original notion. This has provoked some Arab historiansto condemn her as a Zionist propagandist. See, for example, Jan Dayah, Sihafat al-Kawakibi (The journalism of al-Kawakibi) (Beirut: Mu’assasat Fikr lil-Abhathwa-al-Nashr, 1984), 117–135.

73 Kerr, Islamic Reform, 153–166, 219–223.74 Hourani, Arabic Thought, 309–311.75 See Liah Greenfeld’s extensive discussion of this phenomenon as it manifested itself

in Russian and German nationalism. Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads toModernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), chaps 3–4.

76 Landau, Pan-Turkism, 34; Zürcher, Turkey, 136.


1 For a cogent exposition of the impact of twentieth-century warfare on social cultureand mass politics, see Arthur Marwick, War and Social Change in the Twentieth Century: AComparative Study of Britain, France, Germany, Russia and the United States (London:Macmillan, 1974), 11–14 and passim.

Notes 235

2 In the case of the Ottoman empire, we will also examine the wartime evolution ofTurkish nationalism, which was to culminate in the creation of a new Turkish nation-state in the aftermath of the conflict.

3 It has been argued that the wartime tension between Budapest and Vienna ran evendeeper than that between the subject peoples and their rulers. See Robert Bideleuxand Ian Jeffries, A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change (London and New York:Routledge 1998), 399–400, drawing on Oscar Jaszi, The Dissolution of the HabsburgMonarchy (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1961; 1st edn, 1929), 365.

4 Günther E. Rothenberg, “The Habsburg Army in the First World War: 1914–1918,”in Robert A. Kann, Bela K. Király, and Paula S. Fichtner, eds, The Habsburg Empire inWorld War I (Boulder, CO: East European Quarterly, 1977), 80–81.

5 Richard G. Plaschka, “Contradicting Ideologies: The Pressure of IdeologicalConflicts in the Austro-Hungarian Army of World War I,” in Kann et al., TheHabsburg Empire in World War I.

6 Victor S. Mamatey, The United States and East Central Europe, 1914–1918: A Study inWilsonian Diplomacy and Propaganda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957),chap. 5; Kenneth J. Calder, Britain and the Origins of the New Europe, 1914–1918(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), chap. 7.

7 German was the language of command in the Habsburg army.8 Jaszi, Dissolution, 141–148; István Deák, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History

of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992),passim.

9 Rothenberg, “The Habsburg Army in the First World War: 1914–1918,” and JayLuvaas, “A Unique Army: The Common Experience,” in Kann et al., The HabsburgEmpire in World War I; Janos Decsy, “The Habsburg Army on the Threshold of TotalWar,” in Béla Király and Nándor Dreisziger, eds, East Central European Society in WorldWar I (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1985), 284–285.

10 The major exceptions to this pattern were intermittent discrimination against Jewsand favoritism toward Magyars, for whose services the joint army command had tocompete with the Hungarian national guard. Deák, Beyond Nationalism, chap. 10.

11 Ibid. The classic novel portraying the survival of this mentality well into the age ofnationalism is Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March (trans. Joachim Neugroschel, Woodstock,NY: Overlook Press, 1995; Berlin: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1932).

12 Leo Valiani, The End of Austria–Hungary (New York: Knopf, 1973), 197–198; RichardB. Spence, “Yugoslavs, the Austro-Hungarian Army, and the First World War” (Ph.D.diss., University of California at Santa Barbara, 1981), chap. 4.

13 Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk and his Fortunes in the World War (trans. CecilParrott, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1974; 1921–1923).

14 H. Louis Rees, The Czechs during World War I (Boulder, CO: East EuropeanMonographs, 1992), 16; Zbynek Zeman, The Break-up of the Habsburg Empire,1914–1918 (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 51–52 and 54–57; RichardGeorg Plaschka, “Zur Vorgeschichte des Überganges von Einheiten desInfanterieregiments Nr. 28 an der Russischen Front 1915,” in Richard GeorgPlaschka, Nationalismus, Staatsgewalt, Widerstand: Aspekte nationaler und sozialer Entwicklungin Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1985).

15 John Reed reported seeing barbed wire placed behind the Austro-Hungarian lines onthe Serbian front, presumably so as to prevent Serb soldiers in the Habsburg ranksfrom abandoning their positions. John Reed, The War in Eastern Europe (New York:Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 98.

16 This discussion draws on Spence, “Yugoslavs, the Austro-Hungarian Army,”pp. 38–39 and chaps 5, 9, and 10; András Siklós, “The Internal Situation in theAustro-Hungarian Monarchy in the Spring and Summer of 1918,” Etudes historiqueshongroises, vol. 2 (1985), 288–300; Karel Pichlík, “Der militärische Zusammenbruchder Mittelmächte im Jahre 1918,” in Richard Georg Plaschka and Karlheinz Mack,

236 Notes

eds, Die Auflösung des Habsburgerreiches: Zusammenbruch und Neuorientierung im Donauraum(Munich: Oldenbourg, 1970), 254–260.

17 On the demoralization of the Russian army, see Allan K. Wildman, The End of theRussian Imperial Army, vol. 1: The Old Army and the Soldiers’ Revolt (March–April 1917)(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), chaps 3–4.

18 Luvaas, “A Unique Army.”19 The Habsburg military authorities had been reporting that inappropriate fraterniza-

tion was taking place between officers and rank-and-file in the 28th regiment duringthe period before its ignominious battlefield performance. This was seen as bad fordiscipline, but it certainly cannot be construed as an indication of weak group spirit.Plaschka, “Zur Vorgeschichte des Überganges.”

20 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York:Anchor Books, 1990), 175; Leonard V. Smith, Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case ofthe French Fifth Infantry Division during World War I (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 1994), passim; idem, “Remobilizing the Citizen-Soldier through the FrenchArmy Mutinies of 1917,” in John Horne, ed., State, Society and Mobilization in Europeduring the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); StéphaneAudoin-Rouzeau, Men at War 1914–1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism inFrance during the First World War (Oxford: Berg, 1995), chaps 5–6.

21 Nándor F. Dreisziger, “The Dimensions of Total War in East Central Europe,1914–18,” in Király and Dreisziger, eds, East Central European Society, 16–18; Spence,“Yugoslavs, the Austro-Hungarian Army,” chap. 4; Siklós, “Internal Situation,”290–294.

22 Victor S. Mamatey, “The Czech Wartime Dilemma: The Habsburgs or the Entente?”(note no. 4) in Király and Dreisziger, eds, East Central European Society.

23 POWs were heavily propagandized by rival Russian revolutionary parties seeking torecruit supporters and fighters for their causes.

24 Zeman, Break-up, 143–144; Siklós, “Internal Situation,” 294–296.25 This was in marked contrast to the armies of nation-states such as Britain, France,

Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, where front-line entertainment and propagandadrawing on elements of popular culture were actively employed by the militaryauthorities in an effort to maintain the troops’ sense of connection to their homeland.Even if many soldiers in these armies became cynical about official nationalism, theygenerally retained a strong sense that in holding the line they were keeping the enemyaway from their loved ones and native soil. As indicated above, to the extent thattroops of subject nationalities in the Habsburg empire had contact with their home-lands and loved ones, it tended to reinforce their inclination to desert. See J.G. Fuller,Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies, 1914–1918 (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1990); Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War; Vejas GabrieliusLiulevicius, “War Land: Peoples, Lands, and National Identity on the Eastern Frontin World War I” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1994), 188–196; EvelinaKelbetcheva, “Between Apology and Denial: Bulgarian Culture during World WarI,” and Maria Bucur, “Romania: War, Occupation, Liberation,” in Aviel Roshwaldand Richard Stites, eds, European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, andPropaganda, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For aromantic, fictional account of an ethnic Romanian officer’s transformation fromdisciplined officer in the Habsburg army to fervent Romanian nationalist, see LiviuRebreanu’s interwar novel, Forest of the Hanged (London: Owen, 1967; 1930).

26 As quoted in Siklós, “Internal Situation,” 300.27 Siklós, “Internal Situation,” 299–300; Spence, “Yugoslavs, the Austro-Hungarian

Army,” chaps 9–10; Richard Plaschka, “Contradicting Ideologies”; Mark Cornwall,“Morale and Patriotism in the Austro-Hungarian Army, 1914–1918,” in Horne, ed.,State, Society and Mobilization, 184–191.

28 The Czech National Socialists were advocates for workers’ rights within the frame-work of a non-Marxist, explicitly nationalist ideology.

Notes 237

29 This section is heavily indebted to Rees, The Czechs during World War I. It also draws onthe following sources: Zeman, Break-up; Mamatey, “The Czech Wartime Dilemma”;Victor S. Mamatey, “The Union of Czech Political Parties in the Reichsrat,1916–1918,” in Kann et al., The Habsburg Empire in World War I; Valiani, The End ofAustria–Hungary; Péter Hanák, “Die Volksmeinung während des letzten Kriegsjahresin Österreich-Ungarn,” in Plaschka and Mack, eds, Die Auflösung des Habsburgerreiches;Richard Georg Plaschka, “Widerstand 1915 bis 1918 am Modell Pilsen,” in Plaschka,Nationalismus, esp. p. 308; Claire Nolte, “Ambivalent Patriots: Czech Culture in theGreat War,” in Roshwald and Stites, eds, European Culture.

30 I use the term Austro-German to designate ethnically German subjects of theHabsburg monarchy.

31 Zeman (Break-up, 51–52) points out that these soldiers were largely of working-classbackground, from neighborhoods that were strongholds of the somewhat RussophileNational Socialist Party.

32 Rees, The Czechs during World War I, passim. For its part, by 1918, the Magyar press wasclaiming that Hungary was subject to more ruthless requisitions than the Austrianhalf of the empire, with Czech troops and officials supposedly playing a dispropor-tionate role in enforcing such measures and then siphoning the proceeds away fromthe military. Siklós, “Internal Situation,” 287.

33 Zeman, Break-up, 133–139. Zeman suggests that social revolutionary sentimentsgained ground among Austro-German and Magyar workers precisely because theybelonged to ethnic groups that already enjoyed predominance within the Habsburgsystem; they had no pressing sense of national disenfranchisement that could takeprecedence over class interests. Ibid., 145–146.

34 John Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1996), 106–107; Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia (Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 366–367; Spence, “Yugoslavs, the Austro-Hungarian Army,” 69–72. Of course, the Habsburg military’s approach only servedto reinforce Serb hostility to the Habsburg regime and identification with theKingdom of Serbia. See Hanák, “Die Volksmeinung.”

35 Nicholas J. Miller, Between Nation and State: Serbian Politics in Croatia before the First WorldWar (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), chap. 5.

36 Banac, The National Question, 125; Zeman, Break-up, 57–60; Spence, “Yugoslavs, theAustro-Hungarian Army,” 62 and chap. 7. The quotation from Hravatska is takenfrom ibid., 63.

37 Seton-Watson to Ivo Lupis-Vukić (17 October 1909), Seton-Watson to HerbertFisher (9 October 1916), and Herbert Fisher to Seton-Watson (11 October 1916), inHugh and Christopher Seton-Watson, Ljubo Boban, Mirjana Gross, BogdanKrizman, and Dragovan Šepić, eds, R.W. Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs: Correspondence,1906–1941. Vol. 1: 1906–1918 (London: British Academy, 1976), 50–54, 275–282.

38 Wayne S. Vucinich, “Mlada Bosna and the First World War,” in Kann et al., TheHabsburg Empire in World War I; Zeman, Break-up, 59–60; Dragan Zivojinovic, “Serbiaand Montenegro: The Home Front, 1914–18,” in Király and Dreisziger, East CentralEuropean Society in World War I, 252; Banac, The National Question, 129–132; Spence,“Yugoslavs, the Austro-Hungarian Army,” 75–80 and chap. 7. For a fictionalizedaccount of these events, see Ivo Andrić, Bridge on the Drina (trans. Lovett F. Edwards,Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1977 edn), chaps 22–23. A Croat by birth,Andrić became active in the Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia) movement before the warand was interned by the Habsburg authorities as soon as the conflict began. In lateryears, he moved to Belgrade and identified himself as a Serb. Lampe, Yugoslavia asHistory, 89 and 106.

39 This discussion draws upon: Andrew Wachtel, “Culture in the South Slavic Lands,1914–1918,” in Roshwald and Stites, eds, European Culture; Banac, The NationalQuestion, 125–126; Cornwall, “Morale and Patriotism,” 181–182.

238 Notes

40 My main source of information on the Green Cadres is Ivo Banac, “ ‘Emperor Karlhas become a Comitadji’: the Croatian Disturbances of Autumn 1918,” The Slavonicand East European Review, vol. 70, no. 2 (April 1992), 284–305. See also Banac, TheNational Question, 127, 129–131; Spence, “Yugoslavs, the Austro-Hungarian Army,”chap. 8.

41 In October–November 1918, many Serb villages sent petitions to the newly formedCroatian National Council calling for immediate unification with Serbia. Banac, TheNational Question, 129–131.

42 This discussion relies primarily upon: Richard Georg Plaschka, “The Army andInternal Conflict in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1918,” in Király and Dreisziger,East Central European Society; Banac, The National Question, 127–140; Siklós, “InternalSituation,” 286–287; Lampe, Yugoslavia as History, 108–111.

43 Stjepan Radić, leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, was one figure in the NationalCouncil who spoke up vociferously against the virtually unconditional union withSerbia, warning his colleagues that “you evidently do not care a whit that our peasantin general, and especially our Croat peasant, does not wish to hear one more thing …about a state which you are imposing on him by force. …” Quoted in Tim Judah, TheSerbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 1997), 105.

44 Hanák, “Die Volksmeinung,” 63–66; Zeman, Break-up, 139 and 219. See also E.J.Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1990), 126–130. Hobsbawm contends that the quest forsocialism was invariably a stronger and more fundamental impulse among theworking classes than the striving for national self-determination: only when thecrushing of the January strike, the conclusion of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations inMarch 1918 on annexationist terms, and the intensification of the war on theWestern fronts made it clear that a socialist peace was not within sight, did nation-alism win mass support. As long as socialism and nationalism seemed to be equallyviable options, he insists, it was the former that generated the most enthusiasm. ButHobsbawm’s argument is difficult to reconcile with the Czech workers’ failure tostrike en masse in January 1918 (which eased the authorities’ task of suppressing thestrike in German Austria and Hungary) and the grassroots pressure within the CzechSocial Democratic Party that led to the movement’s alignment with the Czech nation-alist camp as early as the summer and autumn of 1917 (see above).

45 I use the Gregorian (Western) calendar throughout this text. The Julian (Old Style)calendar still used in Russia at the time of the revolution was thirteen days behind theWestern calendar.

46 Hubertus Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I (Ithaca, NY and London:Cornell University Press, 1995), Conclusion and passim; Orlando Figes, A People’sTragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Viking, 1996), 282–288.

47 Mark von Hagen, “The Great War and the Mobilization of Ethnicity in the RussianEmpire,” in Barnett R. Rubin and Jack Snyder, eds, Post-Soviet Political Order: Conflictand State Building (London: Routledge, 1998).

48 See Aviel Roshwald, “Jewish Cultural Identity in Eastern and Central Europe duringthe Great War,” in Roshwald and Stites, European Culture.

49 Mark von Hagen, “Writing the History of Russia as Empire: The Perspective ofFederalism,” in Catherine Evtuhov, Boris Gasparov, Alexander Ospovat, and Markvon Hagen, eds, Kazan, Moscow, St. Petersburg: Multiple Faces of the Russian Empire(Moscow: OGI, 1997), 400.

50 Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 1, 103.51 The contact between Finnish and non-Finnish laborers engaged in construction of

fortifications also aroused fears among the Finnish middle classes that their proletariatwas being infected by the dangerous mentalities and barbaric habits attributed to“foreign” workers. The notion that segments of the working class had becomepolluted by alien values helped pave the way for the massacres of Finland’s socialist

Notes 239

Red Guards and their supporters during the country’s White Terror of 1918, whichwas justified as a national cleansing operation. Anthony F. Upton, The FinnishRevolution (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 16–17.

52 Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of theSoviet Union (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 74–75; Andrejs Plakans,The Latvians: A Short History (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1995), 113–118.

53 The Russian capital, St. Petersburg, had been renamed Petrograd after the outbreakof the war.

54 See Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 2: The Road to Soviet Power andPeace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), passim.

55 Andreas Kappeler, Russland als Vielvölkerreich (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1993), chap. 9;Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 380.

56 Arno J. Mayer, Wilson vs. Lenin: Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918(Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Company, 1964 edn; first published as PoliticalOrigins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,1959), 75 and 83.

57 This discussion draws upon: Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union:Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923 (rev. edn, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1964; 1954), 29–31, 50–51; Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 371–372, 375–376; RobertPaul Browder and Alexander F. Kerensky, eds, The Russian Provisional Government, 1917:Documents, vol. 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961), 321–323 and334–335; von Hagen, “Writing the History of Russia as Empire,” 398; WiktorSukiennicki, East Central Europe during World War I: From Foreign Domination to NationalIndependence (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1984), vol. 1, 325–326.

58 Poland and Finland were regarded as special cases because there were nineteenth-century legal precedents for their administrative autonomy. It should also be notedthat after the outbreak of the Great War, even the tsarist government had paid lipservice to the idea of Polish autonomy as a propaganda weapon in its struggle withthe Central Powers.

59 Nicholas P. Vakar, Belorussia, The Making of a Nation: A Case Study (Cambridge, MA:1956), chap. 7; Suny, Revenge, 30–35. The electoral results also reflected the heavyparticipation of soldiers in the Belorussian sector of the Western Front, who voted inoverwhelming numbers for the Bolsheviks as the party that promised to bring aboutan immediate peace.

60 Ibid.; Pipes, Formation, 73–75 and 151.61 Suny, Revenge, passim.62 In referring to regions such as the Ukraine (now known simply as Ukraine) and

Belorussia (Belarus), I use the English terms employed at the time.63 This discussion of Ukrainian nationalist politics draws upon: John S. Reshetar, The

Ukrainian Revolution, 1917–1920: A Study in Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1952), chap. 2; Thomas M. Prymak, Mykhailo Hrushevsky: ThePolitics of National Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), chap. 6;Pipes, Formation, 53–73; Lew Shankowsky, “Disintegration of the Imperial RussianArmy in 1917,” The Ukrainian Quarterly, XIII, 4 (December 1957), 314–315; Figes, APeople’s Tragedy, 374. The Rada’s November 1917 proclamation of Ukrainian inde-pendence was still qualified by a pledge to work toward the transformation ofRussia into “a federation of equal and free peoples.” Unqualified independencewas declared in January 1918, in the wake of Bolshevik attacks. Ivan Rudnytsky,“The Fourth Universal and its Ideological Antecedents,” in Taras Hunczak, ed.,The Ukraine, 1917–1921: A Study in Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1977).

64 It should be noted that the better-off peasants – the so-called agrarian middle class –were better organized and hence more vocal politically than the poorest rural strata.

240 Notes

65 For an attempt to minimize the significance of peasant support for the USRs, seeArthur Takach, “In Search of Ukrainian National Identity: 1840–1921,” Ethnic andRacial Studies, vol. 19, no. 3 (July 1996), 640–659.

66 Alexandre Bennigssen and Chantal Quelquejay, Les Mouvements nationaux chez lesMusulmans de Russie: Le ‘Sultangalievisme’ au Tatarstan (Paris and The Hague: Mouton,1960), 66–69; idem, La Presse et le mouvement national chez les Musulmans de Russie avant1920 (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1964), 185–188; Pipes, Formation, 75–79.

67 Martha Brill Olcott, The Kazakhs (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1987),chap. 4 and pp. 118–126; Edward A. Allworth, The Modern Uzbeks: From the FourteenthCentury to the Present, A Cultural History (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1990),159–160; Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, Islam and the Russian Empire: Reform and Revolutionin Central Asia (trans. Quintin Hoare, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University ofCalifornia Press, 1988), 120; Pipes, Formation, 81–86.

68 On the Kazakhs, see Olcott, Kazakhs, 101–103, 114–118, and chap. 6.69 The Kazakhs had been nominally Muslim for centuries, but knowledge of Muslim

doctrine, let alone its practice, had remained very superficial. To the south, inTurkestan, there was widespread hostility toward the Volga Tatars as agents ofRussian imperialism. Allworth, Uzbeks, 190–191.

70 Tadeusz Swietochowski, Russian Azerbaijan, 1905–1920: The Shaping of National Identityin a Muslim Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 91–94,129–135; Suny, Revenge, 41–43.

71 Allworth, Uzbeks, 161–172; d’Encausse, Islam and the Russian Empire, chaps 7–8.72 The following discussion addresses the ideas developed in Ronald Grigor Suny,

“Nationalism and Class in the Russian Revolution. A Comparative Discussion,” inEdith Ragovin Frankel, Jonathan Frankel, and Baruch Knei-Paz, eds, Revolution inRussia: Reassessments of 1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) andSuny, Revenge, chaps 1–2.

73 Suny, Revenge, 16–19, 33.74 Plakans, Latvians, 113–118; Suny, Revenge, 55–58.75 Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1990), 530. The ethno-

linguistic distinctiveness of the Latvian riflemen and their strong esprit de corps madethem singularly effective as Bolshevik shock troops in the Russian capital, for it setthem apart from the general population and made them immune to the blandish-ments of rival parties. Andrew Ezergailis, The Latvian Impact on the Bolshevik Revolution.The First Phase: September 1917 to April 1918 (Boulder, CO: East EuropeanMonographs, 1983), 281–282 and chap. 9.

76 Stanley W. Page, The Formation of the Baltic States: A Study of the Effects of Great PowerPolitics upon the Emergence of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia (New York: Howard Fertig,1970), 17–21 and chap. 5; Andrew Ezergailis, The 1917 Revolution in Latvia (Boulder,CO: East European Monographs, 1974), 199–202.

77 Ezergailis, Latvian Impact, 205–213.78 As non-Russians, the Latvian Bolsheviks could be holier than the Pope (so to speak)

on the issue of nationalism – articulating a unitarist vision of the future socialist statethat left even less room for national self-determination than Lenin’s stated position.Ezergailis, Latvian Impact, 246.

79 Ahmed Emin Yalman, Turkey in the World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,1930), 105–106.

80 Erik Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I.B. Tauris, 1993), 97–116; BernardLewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 1961),225–227.

81 Jacob M. Landau, Pan-Turkism: From Irredentism to Cooperation (Bloomington andIndianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 45–51, 53; Yalman, Turkey,174–177; Philip Hendrick Stoddard, “The Ottoman Government and the Arabs,1911–1918: A Preliminary Study of the Teškilât-i Mahsusa” (Ph.D. diss., PrincetonUniversity, 1963), 68–70. The German embassy in Istanbul actually played an active

Notes 241

role in urging the pan-Islamic theme upon the CUP as the basis for an anti-Ententepropaganda campaign. This approach was the brainchild of German ForeignMinistry official Baron Max von Oppenheim, an archaeologist, diplomat, propagan-dist, and spy of Jewish origin whose Middle Eastern archaeological excavations oftenserved as cover for intelligence-gathering operations. Donald M. McKale, “Germanyand the Arab Question in the First World War,” Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 29, no. 2(April 1993), 236–253; Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (New York:Norton, 1967; 1961), 123–124. Oppenheim continued to dabble in Middle Easternespionage and anti-British incitement into the 1930s, having earned the status of“honorary Aryan” under the Nazis. Aviel Roshwald, Estranged Bedfellows: Britain andFrance in the Middle East during the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press,1990), 49.

82 This is the prevailing view in recent scholarship (see references below). For adissenting opinion that plays down the significance of Turkish nationalism within theCUP, see Hasan Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in theOttoman Empire, 1908–1918 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of CaliforniaPress, 1997).

83 This discussion draws upon: Zürcher, Turkey, 114, 134; Erik Zürcher, The UnionistFactor: The Role of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish National Movement,1905–1926 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1984), 49–51; Lisa Anderson, “Nationalist Sentimentin Libya,” in Rashid Khalidi, Lisa Anderson, Muhammad Muslih, and Reeva S.Simon, eds, The Origins of Arab Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press,1991), 229–231; Masami Arai, Turkish Nationalism in the Young Turk Era (Leiden: Brill,1992), chap. 5.

84 Also, 1916 witnessed the surrender (on 29 April) of the besieged British garrison atKut in Mesopotamia. Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (NewYork: Henry Holt, 1994), 211–214, 228, 241, 244.

85 German intelligence officers were also involved in some of these, and related, activi-ties. Fischer, Germany’s Aims, 126–131.

86 Landau, Pan-Turkism, 49–56; Yalman, Turkey, chap. 16. See also Chapter 6 of thisbook.

87 Yalman, Turkey, 182–186.88 This discussion of Turkish economic nationalism is based on Yalman, Turkey, chaps

9–13; Feroz Ahmad, “Vanguard of a Nascent Bourgeoisie: The Social and EconomicPolicy of the Young Turks 1908–1918,” in Osman Okyar and Halil Inalcik, eds, Socialand Economic History of Turkey (1071–1920) (Ankara: Meteksan, 1980); Feroz Ahmad,The Making of Modern Turkey (London: Routledge, 1993), 40–46; Zürcher, The UnionistFactor, 76–77; Zürcher, Turkey, 127–131, 171; Niyazi Berkes, The Development ofSecularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964), 335–337 and 425–427.The multifaceted Russian-Jewish Marxist intellectual, German agent, and Bolshevik-German intermediary, Alexander Helphand (Parvus), who resided in Istanbul duringmuch of the war, played an influential role in the CUP’s development of a nationalisteconomic doctrine modeled on Friedrich List’s nineteenth-century protectionist planfor German industrialization. See Ahmad, “Vanguard,” 336–337; Zürcher, Turkey,130; Berkes, Development of Secularism, 335–337 and 425; Z.A.B. Zeman and W.B.Scharlau, The Merchant of Revolution: The Life of Alexander Israel Helphand (London:Oxford University Press, 1965), 127–128.

89 Yalman, Turkey, 197–199; Zürcher, Turkey, 129–131, 134–135.90 Stoddard, “The Ottoman Government and the Arabs, 1911–1918,” 52–59; Zürcher,

Turkey, 114–115, 121, 130; Zürcher, The Unionist Factor, 76–77, 120–121.91 Zürcher, Turkey, 120–121; Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in

Modern History (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993),114. For a defensively pro-Turkish version of these events, see Justin McCarthy, TheOttoman Turks: An Introductory History to 1923 (London: Longman, 1997), 365.

242 Notes

92 Zürcher, Turkey, 120–121; Suny, Looking Toward Ararat, 109–115; Manoug J. Somakian,Empires in Conflict: Armenia and the Great Powers 1895–1920 (London and New York:Tauris, 1995), 70–96; Yalman, Turkey, chap. 18. For a flat denial that the Ottomanauthorities planned any of the violence against the Armenians, see Stanford J. Shawand Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 2(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 314–317.

93 See Selim Deringil, “The Ottoman Origins of Kemalist Nationalism: Namik Kemalto Mustafa Kemal,” European History Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 2 (April 1993), 165–191.

94 This section draws upon the following sources: Eliezer Tauber, The Arab Movements inWorld War I (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1993), 25–37, 62–80, 113; PhilipKhoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus 1860–1920(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 74; Sulayman Musa, Al-Harakah al-Arabiya: sirat al-marhalah al-ula lil-nahdah al-Arabiyah al-hadithah, 1908–1924 (The ArabMovement: The History of the First Stage of the Modern Arab Awakening,1908–1924) (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar lil-Nashr, 1977), 261–262; Stoddard, “TheOttoman Government and the Arabs, 1911–1918,” 147; C. Ernest Dawn, “The Riseof Arabism in Syria,” The Middle East Journal, vol. 16, no. 2 (1962), 145–168; BassamTibi, Arab Nationalism: A Critical Enquiry (2nd edn, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990),118–122; William L. Cleveland, The Making of an Arab Nationalist: Ottomanism andArabism in the Life and Thought of Sati‘ al-Husri (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 1971), x–xi and 32–41.

95 Dawn, “The Rise of Arabism in Syria,” 151; Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali, Memoirs ofMuhammad Kurd ‘Ali: A Selection (trans. Khalil Totah, Washington, DC: AmericanCouncil of Learned Societies, 1954), 56–58. Kurd ‘Ali also argued that his pre-waradvocacy of Arab autonomy had not constituted disloyalty to the Ottoman empire assuch. Ibid., 34–37.

96 The Government of India (Raj) authorities in charge of Britain’s Mesopotamiacampaign were opposed to the efforts of their counterparts in Cairo to incite Arabnationalism. See Briton Cooper Busch, Britain, India, and the Arabs, 1914–1921(Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1971), chaps 2–3 andpp. 202–214; Bruce Westrate, The Arab Bureau: British Policy in the Middle East,1916–1920 (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992),chap. 4; Tauber, The Arab Movements, 31.

5 New Arenas of Action: Nationalisms of Occupation and Exile,1914–1918

1 This discussion draws upon: Heinz Lemke, Allianz und Rivalität: Die Mittelmächte undPolen im Ersten Weltkrieg (East Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1977), pp. 18–19, 54–73,chaps 3, 6, and passim; David Stevenson, The First World War and International Politics(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 91–95, 102–103; Fritz Fischer, Germany’sAims in the First World War (New York: Norton, 1967; 1961), 189–197, 244–246;Wiktor Sukiennicki, East Central Europe during World War I: From Foreign Domination toNational Independence (2 vols, Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1984), vol. 1,chap. 14; Jan Molenda, “Social Changes in Poland during World War I,” in BélaKirály and Nándor Dreisziger, eds, East Central European Society in World War I(Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 1985).

2 It is also worth noting that German ethnographic research in occupied EasternEurope served as an important source of information for The Inquiry, the semi-official American commission charged with preparing recommendations –particularly regarding national boundaries – for the future peace settlement.Lawrence E. Gelfand, The Inquiry: American Preparations for Peace, 1917–1919 (NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 107–108.

3 Lemke, Allianz, 18–19. For a contemporaneous argument in favor of Germany’smarrying idealism to realism by assuming the role of liberator of East European

Notes 243

nationalities, see Wilhelm Feldman, Die Zukunft Polens und der deutsch-polnische Ausgleich(Berlin: Verlag Karl Curtius, September 1915).

4 This discussion of Ober Ost draws heavily on the pathbreaking work of VejasGabrielius Liulevicius, “War Land: Peoples, Lands, and National Identity on theEastern Front in World War I” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1994).

5 Ibid., passim.6 It should be noted that the use of ethnography to categorize and control or co-opt

indigenous peoples was a common feature of nineteenth- and twentieth-centuryimperial administrative culture. See the discussion in Daniel Brower, “Islam andEthnicity: Russian Colonial Policy in Turkestan,” in Daniel R. Brower and Edward J.Lazzerini, eds, Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917 (Bloomingtonand Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997).

7 Liulevicius, “War Land,” chap. 3. See also the Yiddish novel by Oyzer Varshavski,Shmuglars (Smugglers) (Warsaw and New York: Weissenberg Ferlag, 1921; 1920).

8 This section draws upon: Liulevicius, “War Land,” 224–234, 260–280; Gerd Linde,Die Deutsche Politik in Litauen im Ersten Weltkrieg (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1965),89–170; Alfred Erich Senn, The Emergence of Modern Lithuania (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1959), 25–46.

9 For a fuller discussion of this topic, see Aviel Roshwald, “Jewish Cultural Identity inEastern and Central Europe during the Great War,” in Aviel Roshwald and RichardStites, eds, European Culture during the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda,1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

10 Steven J. Zipperstein, “The Politics of Relief: The Transformation of Russian JewishCommunal Life during the First World War,” in Jonathan Frankel, ed., Jews and theEastern European Crisis, 1914–21 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); David G.Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 92; S. An-sky (Shlomo-ZanvillRappoport), Der yidisher khurbn fun Poilen, Galitsye un Bukovina fun tag-buch 1914–1917(The Jewish Catastrophe in Poland, Galicia, and Bukovina from the 1914–17 Diary),in Gezamelte Shriftn (Collected Writings), vols. 4–6 (Warsaw, Vilnius, New York: An-skyPublishing Company, 1927–1928), vol. 4, p. 11; Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (London: Macmillan, 1986), 100–101. Peter Holquistargues that Russian wartime policy toward Jews and ethnic Germans was a manifes-tation of longstanding ideas prevalent in the Russian military about the potential usesof ethnic categorization and social engineering in the creation of a more cohesivebody politic. Peter Holquist, “Total Mobilization and Population Politics: Russia’sDeluge (1914–1921) and its European Context,” paper presented at “Conference onRussia and the Great War,” St. Petersburg, Russia, May 1998.

11 See Sammy Gronemann, Hawdoloh und Zapfenstreich (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1925),insert after p. 24. See also Zosa Szajkowski, “The German Appeal to the Jews ofPoland, August 1914,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series, vol. 59 (1969),311–320.

12 Hirsh Abramovich, Farshvundene geshtalten (zikhroynes und silueten) (Disappeared Figures(Memories and Silhouettes)) (Buenos Aires: Tsentral Ferband fun Poylishe Yiden inArgentine, 1958), 297–299. My thanks to the late Dina Abramowicz of the YIVOInstitute for Jewish Research in New York for bringing this useful source to myattention.

13 Ezra Mendelsohn, Zionism in Poland: The Formative Years, 1915–1926 (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1981), 77; Zosa Szajkowski, “The Struggle for Yiddish duringWorld War I: The Attitude of German Jewry,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book IX (London,1964), 131–158, 140; Abramovich, “Di Vilner Gezelshaft ‘Hilf durch Arbet” and “Ayidishe landwirtshaft-shule in Poilen,” in Farshvundene geshtalten, 327–339 and 340–356;see also ibid., footnote on p. 292; Gronemann, Hawdoloh, 84–85; “Aus demArbeitsleben des Rabbiner Dr. Sali Levi” (pamphlet published in memory of Rabbi

244 Notes

Sali Levi by the board of directors of the Jewish community of Mainz, 21 April1951), 4–6, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

14 Egmont Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik und die Juden im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen:Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969), chap. 12.

15 This was accompanied by a fund-raising drive on behalf of the beleaguered Jewishsettlement (yishuv) in Palestine, whose economic and even physical survival was underthreat by the hostile policies of Jemal Pasha. Mendelsohn, Zionism, chap. 1; Zechlin,Die deutsche Politik und die Juden, 176–178; Der Moment (Warsaw-based Yiddish-languagedaily), 13 July 1917 and various other articles on Palestine relief, summer 1917.German diplomatic intervention – motivated in part by concern over Americanpublic opinion prior to US entry into the war in April 1917 – had played a criticalrole in saving the yishuv from mass deportation. Isaiah Friedman, Germany, Turkey, andZionism, 1897–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), part III.

16 Szajkowski, “The Struggle for Yiddish,” 147; Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers andStrangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 165–168; Zechlin, Die deutschePolitik und die Juden, chaps 9–11; Gershon C. Bacon, “The Poznanski Affair of 1921:Kehillah Politics and the Internal Political Realignment of Polish Jewry,” in Frankel,ed., The Jews and the European Crisis; idem, “Agudat Israel in Interwar Poland,” inYisrael Gutman, Ezra Mendelsohn, Jehuda Reinharz, and Chone Shmeruk, eds, TheJews of Poland between Two World Wars (Hanover, NH: University Press of NewEngland, 1989); Robert Moses Shapiro, “Aspects of Jewish Self-Government in Lódz,1914–1939,” in Antony Polonsky, ed., From Shtetl to Socialism: Studies from Polin (Londonand Washington, DC: Littman Library, 1993); Mark Levene, War, Jews, and the NewEurope: The Diplomacy of Lucien Wolf, 1914–1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1992), 175–176.

17 Linde, Die Deutsche Politik in Litauen, 71–79; Lemke, Allianz und Rivalität, 288–290.18 Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 157–160, 163; Szajkowski, “The Struggle for

Yiddish”; idem, “The Komitee fuer den Osten und Zionism,” in Raphael Patai, ed.,Herzl Year Book, vol. 7 (New York, 1971), 199–240.

19 Vilna is the transliteration of the Yiddish pronunciation of this town’s name.20 Nahma Sandrow, Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater (New York: Harper

& Row, 1977), chap. 8; Gronemann, Hawdoloh, 195–198; Luba Kadison and JosephBuloff, with Irving Genn, On Stage, Off Stage: Memories of a Lifetime in the Yiddish Theatre(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 6–10; Liulevicius, “War Land,”185–186.

21 Even such a qualified reference to the rule of law in German-occupied EasternEurope demands yet further qualification. It has meaning only within the limitedframework of comparison with the former Russian administration of these lands.The very wide gap that separated the German military’s rigid and authoritarianjuridical practice from any true sense of justice is bitterly conveyed in Arnold Zweig’snovel, The Case of Sergeant Grisha (published in German in 1927), discussed byLiulevicius in “War Land,” 93–94. Arnold Zweig served as an officer attached to thepress section of the Ober Ost administration.

22 Gronemann, Hawdoloh, 169–173.23 Liulevicius, “War Land,” 233; Linde, Die Deutsche Politik in Litauen, 37–39.24 For a discussion of Serbian martyrdom myths, see Tim Judah, The Serbs: History,

Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997),chaps 3–4.

25 The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a NewIntroduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict by George F. Kennan (Washington, DC:Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, 1993), passim; Barbara Jelavich, Historyof the Balkans, vol. 2: Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983),95–100.

Notes 245

26 For this discussion, I have drawn upon: C.E.J. Fryer, The Destruction of Serbia in 1915(New York: East European Monographs, 1997), chaps 2–6, 12, 14; DraganZivojinović, “Serbia and Montenegro: The Home Front, 1914–18” and DimitrijeDjordjević, “Vojvoda Putnik, The Serbian High Command, and Strategy in 1914,”in Király and Dreisziger, eds, East Central European Society, 239–245; Jelavich, History ofthe Balkans, vol. 2, 115; John Reed, The War in Eastern Europe (New York: CharlesScribner’s Sons, 1916), 42–49, 57–74; John Clinton Adams, Flight in Winter(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1942), passim; Stilyan Noykov, “TheBulgarian Army in World War I, 1915–18,” in Király and Dreisziger, East CentralEuropean Society; John Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 102, 107–108; Evelina Kelbetcheva,“Between Apology and Denial: Bulgarian Culture during World War I,” in Roshwaldand Stites, eds, European Culture; Andrew Wachtel, “Culture in the South Slavic Lands,1914–1918,” in ibid., 209; Zbynek Zeman, The Break-up of the Habsburg Empire,1914–1918 (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 60; Dragolioub Yovanovitch,Les Effets économiques et sociaux de la guerre en Serbie (Paris: Les Presses Universitaires deFrance, 1930), chap. 7.

27 As quoted in Zivojinović, “Serbia and Montenegro,” 252.28 See Geoff Eley, “Remapping the Nation: War, Revolutionary Upheaval, and State

Formation in Eastern Europe, 1914–1923,” in Peter J. Potichnyj and Howard Aster,eds, Ukrainian–Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective (Edmonton: Canadian Institute ofUkrainian Studies, University of Alberta, 1988, 2nd edn 1990).

29 Fischer, Germany’s Aims, 120–138.30 Mark von Hagen, “The Great War and the Mobilization of Ethnicity in the Russian

Empire,” in Barnett R. Rubin and Jack Snyder, eds, Post-Soviet Political Order: Conflictand State Building (London: Routledge, 1998); Oleh Fedyshyn, “The Germans and theUnion for the Liberation of the Ukraine, 1914–1917,” in Taras Hunczak, ed., TheUkraine, 1917–1921: A Study in Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UkrainianResearch Institute, 1977); Oleh Fedyshyn, Germany’s Drive to the East and the UkrainianRevolution, 1917–1918 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971), 26,30–41.

31 Tadeusz Swietochowski, Russian Azerbaijan, 1905–1920: The Shaping of National Identityin a Muslim Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 77–81.

32 See, for instance, Juozas Gabrys, Ober-Ost: le plan annexionniste allemand en Lithuanie(Lausanne: Bureau d’information de Lithuanie, 1917); Auguste Henri Forel, Für einfreies Lettland im freien Russland! (Basel: Latvija-verlag, 1917); Mykhailo Lozymskyi, Les“droits” de la Pologne sur la Galicie: exposé … (Lausanne: Bureau ukrainien, 1917).

33 Sukiennicki, East Central Europe, vol. 1, 217–239; Fedyshyn, “The Germans and theUnion for the Liberation of the Ukraine,” 314; C.A. Macartney, National States andNational Minorities (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 183.

34 For example, some Lithuanian émigré organizations accused the Taryba of collabo-rating with the Germans. See Liulevicius, “War Land,” 266; Senn, Emergence ofModern Lithuania, 26–27, 38–39.

35 Zbynek Zeman with Antonín Klimek, The Life of Edvard Beneš: 1884–1948 (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1997), chap. 2.

36 Ibid. This argument was presented to the British Foreign Office via Robert Seton-Watson as early as May 1915. See Kenneth J. Calder, Britain and the Origins of the NewEurope, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 81.

37 Erik Goldstein, Winning the Peace: British Diplomatic Strategy, Peace Planning, and the ParisPeace Conference, 1916–1920 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 3–4, 117–119, 123–140,257–259.

38 Although Wilson did not endorse the complete breakup of the Habsburg Empireuntil September 1918, he had expressed sympathy for the Czech cause as early as1889. Victor Mamatey, The United States and East Central Europe, 1914–1918: A Study in

246 Notes

Wilsonian Diplomacy and Propaganda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957),13–14.

39 Calder, Britain, chap. 7 and passim.40 Josef Kalvoda, The Genesis of Czechoslovakia (Boulder, CO: East European

Monographs, 1986), chap. 5.41 Roman Szporluk, The Political Thought of Thomas G. Masaryk (Boulder, CO: East

European Monographs, 1981), 141; Jaroslav Krejcí and Pavel Machonin,Czechoslovakia, 1918–92: A Laboratory for Social Change (London: Macmillan, 1996),9–10. Masaryk also met in Pittsburgh a year later with leaders of the émigréHungarian Ruthenian community, who agreed to support the incorporation of theirhome province (Subcarpathian Rus’) as an autonomous region of the prospectiveCzechoslovak state. Paul Robert Magocsi, The Rusyns of Slovakia: An Historical Survey(New York: East European Monographs, 1993), 59; D. Perman, The Shaping of theCzechoslovak State: Diplomatic History of the Boundaries of Czechoslovakia, 1914–1920(Leiden: Brill, 1962), 26–27. For Masaryk’s defensive account of the PittsburghDeclaration, in which he concedes that the Declaration spoke of Slovak autonomybut denies that he was bound to this provision by signing on to the document, seeThomas Garrigue Masaryk, The Making of a State: Memories and Observations,1914–1918 (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1927), 220–221.

42 Thomas G. Masaryk, The New Europe (The Slav Standpoint) (Lewisburg: BucknellUniversity Press, 1972; first edn, 1918), 138.

43 Ibid. See also Szporluk, Political Thought, 139.44 See Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), 21–22. Edvard Beneš seems to have been even lesssensitive to the distinctiveness of Slovak identity. William V. Wallace, “Masaryk andBeneš and the Creation of Czechoslovakia: a Study in Mentalities,” in Harry Hanak,ed., T.G. Masaryk (1850–1937), vol. 3 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 77–78.

45 Derek Sayer, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1998), 171; Zeman, Life of Beneš, 24–25.

46 Stanislav J. Kirschbaum, A History of Slovakia: The Struggle for Survival (New York:St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 150–152.

47 Gale Stokes, “The Role of the Yugoslav Committee in the Formation of Yugoslavia,”and Milorad Ekmecić, “Serbian War Aims,” in Dimitrije Djordjević, ed., The Creationof Yugoslavia 1914–1918 (Santa Barbara, CA and Oxford: Clio Press, 1980).

48 Ibid., “Introduction”; Calder, Britain, 78 and chap. 5; Ivo J. Lederer, “Nationalism andthe Yugoslavs,” in Peter F. Sugar and Ivo John Lederer, eds, Nationalism in EasternEurope (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1994; 1969), 429–430.

49 Seton-Watson to Foreign Office (1 October 1914), in Hugh and Christopher Seton-Watson , Ljubo Boban, Mirjana Gross, Bogdan Krizman, and Dragovan Šepić, eds,R.W. Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs: Correspondence, 1906–1941. Vol. 1: 1906–1918(London: British Academy, 1976), 180–186. Once he had taken a clear stance in favorof Czechoslovak independence, Masaryk similarly resorted to the argument ofBohemian historic state right in justifying his claim to strategically vital, but German-populated, regions.

50 This discussion draws upon: Ekmecić, “Serbian War Aims,” 20–23; DraganZivojinović, “Serbia and Montenegro: The Home Front, 1914–18,” in Király andDreisziger, eds, East Central European Society, 242; Lampe, Yugoslavia as History, 100–101;Stokes, “Role of the Yugoslav Committee”; Ivo Banac, The National Question inYugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press,1984), 202–209.

51 Smodlaka to Seton-Watson (29 April 1911) in H. and C. Seton-Watson, Seton-Watsonand the Yugoslavs, 82–83.

52 The Times (London), 24 and 26 June 1915. Not everyone who saw the sculptures likedthem. The Times of 30 June 1915 published a letter from the poet Selwyn Image

Notes 247

attacking Meštrović’s work as “wilful, inchoate, amorphous, even monstrous …” andobjecting to the official sponsorship of the exhibition.

53 Seton-Watson to Mabel Grukić (15 March 1915), in H. and C. Seton-Watson, Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs, 199–205.

54 H. and C. Seton-Watson, “Introduction,” in Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs, 25.55 Supilo to Seton-Watson (31 December 1916) in ibid., 286–287.56 Supilo to Seton-Watson (26 May 1917) in H. and C. Seton-Watson, Seton-Watson and

the Yugoslavs, 294–295; Stokes, “Role of the Yugoslav Committee,” 57–58.57 See David MacKenzie, APIS: The Congenial Conspirator: The Life of Colonel Dragutin T.

Dimitrijević (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1989), chaps 16–25.58 Stokes, “Role of the Yugoslav Committee,” 58–59; Seton-Watson to Intelligence

Bureau (1 June 1917), Milorad Drašković (Serbian opposition deputy) to Seton-Watson (21 September 1918), and Seton-Watson to Foreign Office (4 October 1918),in H. and C. Seton-Watson, Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs, 296–298, 336–339, and350–355.

59 This discussion relies upon: Stokes, “Role of the Yugoslav Committee,” 58; Lampe,Yugoslavia as History, 60–64, 102–104, 108–111; Mamatey, The United States and EastCentral Europe, chap. 4; Judah, The Serbs, 104–106.

60 One of Dmowski’s most consistent objectives was the inclusion of extensive German-ruled territories in a future Polish state. Those lands included Upper Silesia, Poznań,West Prussia, East Prussia (whose exclusively German-inhabited northern zone was tobe granted some form of self-rule), and part of Pomerania. Roman Dmowski,Problems of Central and Eastern Europe (London: privately printed, 1917), 66–75.

61 Paul Latawski, “The Discrepancy between State and Ethnographic Frontiers:Dmowski and Masaryk on Self-determination,” in Hanak, ed., Masaryk; idem,“Roman Dmowski and Western Opinion,” in Latawski, ed., The Reconstruction ofPoland, 1914–23 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992); Alvin Marcus Fountain III,Roman Dmowski: Party, Tactics, Ideology 1895–1907 (Boulder, CO: East EuropeanMonographs, 1980), 110. A broad array of Jewish organizations and personalitieslobbied hard against Western recognition of Dmowski’s Polish National Committeeand in favor of creating a political framework in postwar Poland that would protectminority rights. Eugene Black, “Lucien Wolf and the Making of Poland: Paris,1919,” in Antony Polonsky, ed., From Shtetl to Socialism: Studies from Polin (London andWashington, DC: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1993), 274–275 and291, nos. 24 and 25; Eugene Black, “Squaring a Minorities Triangle: Lucien Wolf,Jewish Nationalists and Polish Nationalists,” in Latawski, ed., The Reconstruction ofPoland, 1914–23, 22–23. The Polish National Committee did enjoy some sympathyamong a number of highly placed conservative Catholic officials in the BritishForeign Office. Levene, War, Jews, 190.

62 Levene, War, Jews, 188–190.63 Adam Zamoyski, Paderewski (New York: Atheneum, 1982), chaps 10–12; Andrzej

Garlicki, Józef Piłsudski, 1867–1935, ed., abridged, and trans. from the Polish by JohnCoutrouvidis (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), 89–90; Zeman, Break-up of the HabsburgEmpire, 195–196.

64 This section is heavily indebted to the last two volumes of David Vital’s magisterial,three-volume history of Zionism: Zionism: The Formative Years (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1982) and Zionism: The Crucial Phase (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

65 Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha‘am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley,CA: University of California Press, 1993), chaps 3–4. Zipperstein points out that inmany respects, such as his questioning of parliamentary democracy, Ahad Ha‘am’sbrand of cultural elitism was idiosyncratic and at odds with the intellectual main-stream of cultural Zionism. Ibid., 150–153.

66 Neville Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I (Berkeley, CA: University ofCalifornia Press, 1976), xxiv. In the course of the First World War, Palestine’s totalJewish population would decline to around 60,000; the Arab population of what was

248 Notes

to become mandatory Palestine stood around 600,000 in 1914. Muhammad Muslih,The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988),13–14.

67 Isaiah Friedman, Germany, Turkey and Zionism, 1897–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1977), chaps 11–16, esp. chap. 16.

68 Jehudah Reinharz, Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Zionist Leader (New York andOxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), chaps 3–4 and 10–11; idem, Chaim Weizmann:The Making of a Statesman (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993),chaps 1–6; Vital, Zionism: The Crucial Phase, 156–166.

69 Isaiah Friedman, The Question of Palestine, 1914–1918. British–Jewish–Arab Relations(New York: Schocken Books, 1973), passim; Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration (NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 1961), chap. 17.

70 As quoted in Friedman, Question of Palestine, 279.71 But note the success of the Zionist petition in Poland in 1917, as described earlier in

this chapter.72 Vital, Zionism: The Crucial Phase, 251–252.73 Ibid., 271–280; Levene, War, Jews, 2–7, chaps 5–7; David Stevenson, The First World

War and International Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 178. TheConjoint Committee was dissolved, only to be reconstituted in December 1917 as theJoint Foreign Committee.

74 Von Hagen, “The Great War and the Mobilization of Ethnicity,” 14; Fedyshyn, “TheGermans and the Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine,” 315–319; Anthony A.Upton, The Finnish Revolution, 1917–1918 (Minneapolis, MN: University of MinnesotaPress, 1980), 20–25.

75 The Serbian Volunteer Corps was answerable to the authority of Serbia’s govern-ment-in-exile. Following its deployment against Bulgarian forces on Romania’sDobrudja front in 1916, where it suffered extremely heavy casualties, most of thecorps’ surviving Croat and Slovene officers and soldiers abandoned it in disgust overthe ethnic chauvinism and anti-Yugoslavism of their Serb commanders. See IvoBanac, “South Slav Prisoners of War in Revolutionary Russia,” in Samuel R.Williamson and Peter Pastor, eds, Essays on World War I: Origin and Prisoners of War(New York: East European Monographs, 1983); Richard B. Spence, “Yugoslavs, theAustro-Hungarian Army, and the First World War” (Ph.D. diss., University ofCalifornia at Santa Barbara, 1981), chap. 6.

76 John F.N. Bradley, The Czechoslovak Legion in Russia, 1914–1920 (Boulder, CO: EastEuropean Monographs, 1991), 14. For a succinct account of the CzechoslovakLegion in Russia, see Rowan A. Williams, “The Czech Legion Revisited,” East CentralEurope, vol. 6, pt. 1 (1979), 20–39.

77 Josef Kalvoda, “The Origins of the Czechoslovak Army, 1914–18,” in Király andDreisziger, eds, East Central European Society, 423; Josef Kalvoda, “Czech and SlovakPrisoners of War in Russia during the War and Revolution,” in Samuel R.Williamson, Jr. and Peter Pastor, eds, Essays on World War I: Origins and Prisoners of War(New York: East European Monographs, 1983).

78 Kalvoda, “Czech and Slovak Prisoners of War,” 229–234. As Kalvoda points out, theclashes between the Czechoslovak Legion and Bolshevized Magyars and Austro-Germans evoke an image of a Habsburg civil war being played out on Russian soil.The threat posed by German and Magyar POWs was exaggerated by French andWhite Russian propaganda aimed at securing American participation in an anti-Bolshevik intervention in the Russian civil war. George F. Kennan, Soviet–AmericanRelations, 1917–1920, vol. 2: The Decision to Intervene (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1958), 400–403; Betty Miller Unterberger, The United States,Revolutionary Russia, and the Rise of Czechoslovakia (Chapel Hill, NC: The University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1989), chaps 12–15.

79 Zeman, Break-up of the Habsburg Empire, chap. 7; Kennan, Soviet–American Relations,chaps 12–13 and 17.

Notes 249

80 Rowan A. Williams, “The Odyssey of the Czechs,” East European Quarterly, vol. 9,no. 1 (Spring 1975), 15–38.

81 Claire Nolte, “Ambivalent Patriots: Czech Culture in the Great War,” in Roshwaldand Stites, eds, European Culture, 168.

82 Arne Novak, Czech Literature, trans. Peter Kussi (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan SlavicPublications, 1976), 288–291. It should be pointed out that the experiences of theLegion in Siberia also gave rise to anti-war fiction. Ibid.

83 Leonard Ratajczyk, “The Evolution of the Polish Army, 1914–22,” LeonardRatajczyk, “Development of the Polish Officer Corps in World War I,” and LeslawDudek, “Polish Military Formations in World War I,” in Király and Dreisziger, eds,East Central European Society; Harold Segel, “Culture in Poland during World War I,” inRoshwald and Stites, eds, European Culture.

84 Ratajczyk, “The Evolution of the Polish Army,” 440–441; M. Kamil Dziewanowski,“Polish Society in World War I: Armed Forces and Military Operations,” in Királyand Dreisziger, eds, East Central European Society, 488; Garlicki, Piłsudski, chap. 4.

85 Dziewanowski, “Polish Society,” 489; Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History ofPoland, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 381–385.

86 Dziewanowski, “Polish Society,” 489–493; Garlicki, Piłsudski, chap. 4 and p. 88; R.F.Leslie, Antony Polonsky, Jan M. Ciechanowski, and Z.A. Pelczynski, eds, The Historyof Poland since 1863 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 116–127; M.Kamil Dziewanowski, Joseph Piłsudski: A European Federalist, 1918–1922 (Stanford,CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1969), 56–57; Sukiennicki, East Central Europe, vol. 1,chaps 14, 18, and 29 and pp. 333–342; Davies, God’s Playground, 385–392.

87 Dziewanowski, “Polish Society,” 488; Ratajczyk, “The Evolution of the Polish Army,”444.

88 Ibid., 445.89 Zeman, Break-up of the Habsburg Empire, 154–157; Sukiennicki, East Central Europe,

vol. 1, 540–565.90 Ratajczyk, “The Evolution of the Polish Army,” 444–447; Dziewanowski, “Polish

Society,” 494–496; Sukiennicki, East Central Europe, vol. 2, chap. 27.91 Lew Shankowsky, “Disintegration of the Imperial Russian Army in 1917,” The

Ukrainian Quarterly, XIII, 4 (December 1957), 308.92 See Chapter 7.93 As quoted in Garlicki, Piłsudski, 73.94 Ibid., 74.95 William Ochsenwald, “Ironic Origins: Arab Nationalism in the Hejaz, 1882–1914,”

in Rashid Khalidi, Lisa Anderson, Muhammad Muslih, and Reeva S. Simon, eds,The Origins of Arab Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); ErnestDawn, From Ottomanism to Arabism: Essays on the Origins of Arab Nationalism (Urbana, IL:University of Illinois Press, 1973), chaps 1–4.

96 Ibid.97 Ochsenwald, “Ironic Origins”; Dawn, Ottomanism to Arabism, chap. 3; Zeine N. Zeine,

The Struggle for Arab Independence (2nd edn, Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1977; 1960),chap. 1. One of Hussein’s attractions from the point of view of the British authoritiesin Egypt was as a counter to Ottoman pan-Islamic propaganda. On the other hand,the British government of India (the Raj), which was caught up in a rivalry withCairo over influence and authority in Arabia and Mesopotamia (where the Raj was incharge of the military campaign against the Ottomans), feared that British supportfor a revolt against the Ottoman caliph would provoke unrest among India’s Muslims.Briton Cooper Busch, Britain, India, and the Arabs, 1914–1921 (Berkeley, CA: Universityof California Press, 1971), chaps 2, 4, 5; Bruce Westrate, The Arab Bureau: British Policyin the Middle East, 1916–1920 (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State UniversityPress, 1992), chap. 4.

98 Eliezer Tauber, The Arab Movements in World War I (London: Frank Cass, 1993),chap. 3; Zeine, Struggle for Arab Independence, 22. The British also recognized

250 Notes

Hussein as King of the Hejaz. Whether or not Palestine was to be included in theprospective sphere of Arab independence remains the subject of controversy, giventhe ambiguous wording of the documents. Britain’s 1916 Sykes–Picot agreement withthe French on partition of the region into spheres of influence and its commitment tothe Zionists regarding Palestine under the terms of the 1917 Balfour Declarationfurther contributed to an overly complex diplomatic framework that could not fail toexacerbate tensions among rival claimants to territory and power in the Middle East.See Friedman, Question of Palestine, chap. 6; idem, “The McMahon–HusseinCorrespondence and the Question of Palestine,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 5,no. 2 (1970), 83–122; Arnold Toynbee and Isaiah Friedman, “The McMahon–Hussein Correspondence: Comments and a Reply,” Journal of Contemporary History,vol. 5, no. 4 (1970), 185–201; Elizabeth Monroe, Britain’s Moment in the Middle East,1914–1971 (2nd edn, London: Chatto & Windus, 1981; 1963), 26–37.

99 See Mary Wilson, “The Hashemites, the Arab Revolt, and Arab Nationalism,” inKhalidi et al., eds, Origins of Arab Nationalism.

100 Tauber, The Arab Movements, chap. 5. Many of the POWs sent from prison camps inIndia to the Hejaz proved unwilling to join the Sharifian forces or the Arab Legionthat British authorities were trying to organize, leading the Cairo authorities tosuspect the Raj, which opposed Cairo’s sponsorship of the Revolt, of deliberatelysabotaging the recruitment effort. Westrate, The Arab Bureau, 90–91.

101 Tauber, The Arab Movements, chap. 5.102 Ibid., 134–144.103 Elie Kedourie, “The Capture of Damascus, 1 October 1918,” in idem, The Chatham

House Version and Other Middle Eastern Studies (Hanover, NH: University Press of NewEngland, 1984 edn).

6 Defining the Boundaries of the Nation, 1918–1923

1 Robert Bideleux and Ian Jeffries, A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change (London:Routledge, 1998), 404.

2 Robert G.L. Waite, Vanguard of Nazism: The Free Corps Movement in Postwar Germany,1918–1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), chap. 5. The Alliedand Associated Powers initially allowed the Free Corps to operate in the Baltic inorder to hold the Bolsheviks at bay.

3 Paul Robert Magocsi, The Rusyns of Slovakia: An Historical Survey (New York: EastEuropean Monographs, 1993), chap. 7 and p. 71; Piotr S. Wandycz, France and HerEastern Allies, 1919–1925 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1962),64–65, 68–69.

4 Peter F. Sugar, Péter Hanák, and Tibor Frank, eds, A History of Hungary (Bloomington,IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 303–309.

5 The Bolsheviks had won 40 per cent of the Estonian vote and 72 per cent of the votein the parts of Latvia not yet occupied by the Germans in the November 1917 elec-tions to the Russian Constituent Assembly (which was dissolved by Lenin’s regime inJanuary 1918 after meeting for one day). Toivo Raun, Estonia and the Estonians(Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1987), 103; Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revengeof the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press, 1993), 54, 57.

6 John W. Wheeler-Bennett, Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace, March 1918 (New York:Norton, 1971; 1938), chap. 4 and pp. 243–247, 262–275; Alfred Erich Senn, TheEmergence of Modern Lithuania (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), chap. 3;Vejas Gabrielius Liulevicius, “War Land: Peoples, Lands, and National Identity onthe Eastern Front in World War I” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1994),271–272; Suny, The Revenge of the Past, 55–58, 64–72; Andrejs Plakans, The Latvians: AShort History (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1995), chap. 7; Raun, Estonia,

Notes 251

chap. 8; Anthony F. Upton, The Finnish Revolution, 1917–1918 (Minneapolis, MN:University of Minnesota Press, 1980), chaps 12–17.

7 Lloyd Ambrosius, “Dilemmas of National Self-Determination: Woodrow Wilson’sLegacy,” in Christian Baechler and Carole Fink, eds, The Establishment of EuropeanFrontiers after the Two World Wars (Berlin: Peter Lang, 1996).

8 Victor Mamatey, The United States and East Central Europe, 1914–1918: A Study inWilsonian Diplomacy and Propaganda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957),chaps 2, 4, and 5; Harold I. Nelson, Land and Power: British and Allied Policy on Germany’sFrontiers, 1916–19 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 30–31, 38–39; AlanSharp, The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking in Paris, 1919 (New York: St. Martin’s Press,1991), 130–132, 155–157.

9 As quoted in Sharp, Versailles, 156.10 William R. Keylor, “The Principle of National Self-Determination as a Factor in the

Creation of Postwar Frontiers in Europe, 1919 and 1945,” in Baechler and Fink,eds, The Establishment of European Frontiers; Lawrence E. Gelfand, The Inquiry: AmericanPreparations for Peace, 1917–1919 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963),chaps 3 and 7; Erik Goldstein, Winning the Peace: British Diplomatic Strategy, PeacePlanning, and the Paris Peace Conference, 1916–1920 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991),chap. 2 and pp. 123–140; Nelson, Land and Power, 367–370; Mamatey, The UnitedStates and East Central Europe, 174.

11 Keylor, “The Principle of National Self-Determination.” Wilson and Lloyd Georgedid not necessarily follow the recommendations of their experts, and the final bound-aries were not shaped exclusively by ethnic criteria but also by strategicconsiderations, feelings of antipathy toward the former Central Powers, and events onthe ground in East Central Europe. My point is that the process of investigating rivalterritorial claims highlighted the role of ethnicity as the foundation of national iden-tity.

12 Robert Lansing, The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative (Boston, MA and New York:Houghton Mifflin, 1921), chap. 7.

13 I am expanding here on a point made by Antoni Czubinski in “Les frontières de l’étatpolonais, 1914–1990,” in Baechler and Fink, eds, The Establishment of European Frontiers.

14 On the state map as logo of nationhood, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities(rev. edn, London and New York: Verso, 1991; 1983), 170–178.

15 Wandycz, France and Her Eastern Allies, chap. 3 and pp. 148–160. The most detailed,English-language work on the Czechoslovak territorial settlement is D. Perman, TheShaping of the Czechoslovak State: Diplomatic History of the Boundaries of Czechoslovakia,1914–1920 (Leiden: Brill, 1962).

16 Jaroslav Krejcí and Pavel Machonin, Czechoslovakia, 1918–92: A Laboratory for SocialChange (London: Macmillan, 1996), 12.

17 Wandycz, France and Her Eastern Allies, chaps 4–6; M. Kamil Dziewanowski, JosephPiłsudski: A European Federalist, 1918–1922 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press,1969), 315–319 and chap. 17.

18 Wandycz, France and Her Eastern Allies, 43–48, 225–237.19 On the very eve of the Paris Peace Conference’s opening in January 1919, Dmowski

and Piłsudski were able temporarily to patch up their differences in the interest ofpresenting a common front: Dmowski’s political partner, Paderewski, was appointedPrime Minister and Foreign Minister; the Polish National Committee was enlarged toinclude left-wing allies of Piłsudski in return for Piłsudski’s recognition of theCommittee as representative of Poland’s interests at the Peace Conference; Dmowskiand Paderewski were to serve as official delegates to the Conference; Piłsudski wasconfirmed in his role as Polish Chief of State. Robert Machray, The Poland of Piłsudski(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1936), chap. 3.

20 Often referred to as the Big Four, this was composed of the leaders of the UnitedStates, Britain, France, and Italy, whose deliberations largely shaped the outcome ofthe Paris Peace Conference.

252 Notes

21 He claimed that because the Ukrainians of Galicia had been so long under Habsburgrule, they had nothing in common with the Ukrainian Republic to the East, in formerRussian territory. Interview of Paderewski by the Big Four, 5 June, 11:00am, inArthur Link, ed., The Deliberations of the Council of Four (March 24–June 28, 1919): Notesof the Official Interpreter, Paul Mantoux (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992),309.

22 First Lloyd George quotation from ibid., 311–312; second from ibid., meeting of9 June, 11:00am, 352. It should be noted in this context that Britain was itself atthat time busily integrating territories seized from the Ottoman empire andGermany into its already bloated overseas empire.

23 This was the body composed of the Big Ten heads of government and foreign minis-ters of the US, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan who constituted the official executivecommittee of the Peace Conference.

24 The Supreme Council attempted to save face by recommending that Eastern Galiciabe granted autonomy and that its ultimate disposition be determined by plebiscite. In1923, Britain and France finally recognized Poland’s eastern frontiers, including itscontrol of Eastern Galicia, after the Polish parliament had formally conferredautonomy on the region; this autonomy remained purely notional. See MichaelZurowski, “The British Foreign Office and Poland’s Eastern Minorities, 1918–1941,”part I, The Ukrainian Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 3 (Fall 1990), 262–281; Laurence J. Orzell,“A ‘Hotly Disputed’ Issue: Eastern Galicia at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919,”Polish Review, vol. 25, no. 1 (1980), 49–68; Antony Polonsky, Politics in IndependentPoland, 1921–1939: The Crisis of Constitutional Government (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1972), 51–52; Kay Lundgreen-Nielsen, “The Mayer Thesis Reconsidered: ThePoles and the Paris Peace Conference, 1919,” The International History Review, vol. 7,no. 1 (February 1985), 68–102; Wandycz, France and Her Eastern Allies, chaps 5–6; H.J.Elcock, “Britain and the Russo-Polish Frontier, 1919–1921,” Historical Journal, vol. 12,no. 1 (1969), 137–154.

25 The League of Nations Covenant, drawn up in February 1919, failed to incorporateany general guarantee of minority rights in member states, due to an impasse arisingfrom American unwillingness to extend such rights to racial as well as religiousminorities. See Mark Levene, “Britain, a British Jew, and Jewish Relations with theNew Poland: The Making of the Polish Minorities Treaty of 1919,” Polin, vol. 8,Antony Polonsky, Ezra Mendelsohn, and Jerzy Tomaszewski, eds, Jews in IndependentPoland, 1918–1939 (London and Washington, DC: Littman Library of JewishCivilization, 1994), 14–41 (esp. 33); Carole Fink, “The League of Nations and theMinorities Question,” World Affairs, vol. 157, no. 4 (Spring 1995), 197–205.

26 American Jewish relief organizations continued to have access to German-occupiedPoland as long as the US remained neutral.

27 This could be seen as an attempt to create an updated version of the Council of theFour Lands that represented Jewish interests in the early modern Polish–LithuanianCommonwealth.

28 The notion of one form or another of extraterritorial, national-cultural autonomy forJews enjoyed support among other Jewish political movements in Poland, such as theFolkists (advocates of Yiddish culture) and the Bundists. Mark Levene, War, Jews, andthe New Europe: The Diplomacy of Lucien Wolf, 1914–1919 (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1992), 215–216. On the unfulfilled precedent of Jewish autonomy in the short-lived Ukrainian republic, see Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine (Seattle, WA:University of Washington Press, 1996), 503–507.

29 For a recent revival and expansion upon this approach by a scholar of internationallaw, see Gidon Gottlieb, Nation against State (New York: Council on Foreign RelationsPress, 1993).

30 This discussion draws on the publications of Mark Levene cited throughout thissection.

Notes 253

31 Levene, “Nationalism and its Alternatives in the International Arena: The JewishQuestion at Paris 1919,” The Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 28, no. 3 (July 1993),511–531; Fink, “The League of Nations.” Wolf ’s program represented a step backfrom his earlier advocacy of more far-reaching cultural autonomy for Poland’s Jews.These ideas had been shaped by his reading of some of Karl Renner’s writings on thenational problem in the Habsburg empire. Levene, War, Jews, 179–180; idem, “Britain,a British Jew,” 17. For background information on Renner and the Austro-Marxists,see Chapter 2 of the present book.

32 Among the precedents for this approach was Article 44 of the international treatysettling the Eastern Crisis, drawn up at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. Thisattempted to protect Romania’s much abused Jewish population by providing fortheir naturalization and guaranteeing their civil rights. The Romanian parliamentcircumvented these provisions in the following year by drawing up a constitutionalamendment that paid lip service to its treaty obligations while setting up virtuallyinsurmountable roadblocks to the actual naturalization of the country’s Jews, mostof whom were immigrants or children of immigrants from the Russian empire andGalicia. See Fink, “The League of Nations”; Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck,Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1977),chap. 14; Keith Hitchins, Rumania, 1866–1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1994), 52–53. The Polish Minorities Treaty sought to plug this loophole by empha-sizing the civil rights of all “inhabitants” of Polish territory.

33 Memorandum from Paderewski to the Big Four, discussed at meeting of 17 June1919, 4:00pm, in Link, ed., The Deliberations of the Big Four, 492.

34 On the broader cultural rights guaranteed the German minority in Poland’s portionof Upper Silesia following its partition, see Janusz Zarnowski, “Le Système de protec-tion des minorités et la Pologne,” Acta Poloniae Historica, vol. 52 (1985), 105–124, esp.113–114.

35 Fink, “The League of Nations”; C.A. Macartney, National States and National Minorities(London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 220–240.

36 Patrick B. Finney, “‘An Evil for All Concerned’: Great Britain and MinorityProtection after 1919,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 30, no. 3 (July 1995),533–551; Fink, “The League of Nations,” note 2; Macartney, National States, chap. 7;D.R. Gadgil, “The Protection of Minorities,” in William F. Mackey and AlbertVerdoort, eds, The Multinational Society: Papers of the Ljubljana Seminar (Rowley, MA:Newbury House Publishers, 1975), 71–72.

37 The following discussion draws on these works: Gabriele Simoncini, “The PolyethnicState: National Minorities in Interbellum Poland,” Nationalities Papers, vol. 22, supple-ment no. 1 (1994), 5–28; Pawel Korzec, “Der Block der Nationalen Minderheiten inParlamentarismus Polens des Jahres 1922,” Zeitschrift für Ostforschung, vol. 24, no. 2(June 1975), 193–220; Yisrael Gutman, “Polish Antisemitism between the Wars: AnOverview,” in Yisrael Gutman, Ezra Mendelsohn, Jehuda Reinharz, and ChoneShmeruk, eds, The Jews of Poland between Two World Wars (Hanover, NH: UniversityPress of New England, 1989); Polonsky, Politics in Independent Poland, pp. 65, 87, 92,chaps 3–4, pp. 213–218, 371–378; Ilya Prizel, National Identity and Foreign Policy:Nationalism and Leadership in Poland, Russia and Ukraine (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1998), 62–67; Andrzej Korbonski, “Poland: 1918–1990,” in JosephHeld, ed., The Columbia History of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century (New York:Columbia University Press, 1992), 232–234; Zarnowski, “Le Système,” 122–123;Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, vol. 2 (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1982), 404–410. On the main Polish peasant party’s inclination totarget minorities and form coalitions with Dmowski’s National Democrats, see OlgaA. Narkiewicz, The Green Flag: Polish Populist Politics, 1867–1970 (London: CroomHelm, 1976), 185, 190, and 197–198; Dziewanowski, Piłsudski, 336.

38 The percentage of Poland’s Jews identifying Yiddish or Hebrew, rather than Polish, astheir native tongue, increased from 74.2 to 87 per cent between 1921 and 1931,

254 Notes

according to official census figures. This was probably not simply a reflection of thesuccess of private Jewish schools, but also an expression of the increased alienation ofPolish Jewry from the state’s official nationalism. Prizel, National Identity, 65.

39 On the dynamic relationship between the “nationalizing state” and minorities, seeRogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the NewEurope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 63–66 and chap. 4.

40 In Bukovina, no one ethnic group constituted a simple majority, and much of thepeasantry was Ukrainian.

41 Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania. Regionalism, Nation Building, andEthnic Struggle, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); HildrunGlass, Zerbrochene Nachbarschaft: Das deutsch-jüdische Verhältnis in Rumänien (1918–1938)(Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996); Hitchins, Rumania, 290.

42 Glass, Zerbrochene Nachbarschaft, passim.43 Sam Beck and Marilyn McArthur, “Romania: Ethnicity, Nationalism and

Development,” in Sam Beck and John W. Cole, eds, Ethnicity and Nationalism inSoutheastern Europe (Amsterdam: Antropologisch-Sociologisch Centrum, University ofAmsterdam, 1981), 44–48.

44 On Romanian fascism, see Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania, and EugenWeber, “The Men of the Archangel,” in George Mosse, ed., International Fascism: NewThoughts and New Approaches (London: Sage Publications, 1979), 317–343. For similardevelopments in Latvia, see Andrejs Plakans, The Latvians: A Short History (Stanford,CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1995), 118–123.

45 Geoff Eley, “Remapping the Nation: War, Revolutionary Upheaval, and StateFormation in Eastern Europe, 1914–1923,” in Peter J. Potichnyj and Howard Aster,eds, Ukrainian–Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective (Edmonton, 1988); Karl J.Newman, European Democracy between the Wars (trans. Kenneth Morgan, London:George Allen & Unwin, 1970), 147–173; Zarnowski, “Le Système de protection,”109. Of course, fear of Communism also played into the hands of right-wing nation-alists across Europe during the interwar years. See Eley, “Remapping.” On thesynthesis of anti-Semitism with anti-Communism in interwar Polish politicaldiscourse, see Simoncini, “The Polyethnic State,” 7–8.

46 Newman, European Democracy, 174–179; Iván T. Bérend and György Ránki, “Diewirtschaftlichen Probleme des Donaubeckens nach dem Zerfall der Österreichisch-Ungarischen Monarchie”, in Richard Georg Plaschka and Karlheinz Mack, eds, DieAuflösung des Habsburgerreiches: Zusammenbruch und Neuorientierung im Donauraum (Munich:Oldenbourg, 1970); Norman Davies, God’s Playground, 410–417; Hitchins, Rumania,chap. 8 and p. 416.

47 This section is heavily indebted to Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union:Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923 (rev. edn, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1964; 1954), chaps 3–5.

48 Waite, Vanguard of Nazism, chap. 5; Anthony F. Upton, The Finnish Revolution,1917–1918 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), chaps 12–17;Plakans, The Latvians, 113–115.

49 This section draws upon: Tadeusz Swietochowski, Russian Azerbaijan, 1905–1920: TheShaping of National Identity in a Muslim Community (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1985), chaps 5–6; idem, “National Consciousness and Political Orientations inAzerbaijan, 1905–1920,” in Ronald Grigor Suny, ed., Transcaucasia, Nationalism andSocial Change: Essays in the History of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia (rev. edn, Ann Arbor,MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996; 1983), 224–225; John W. Wheeler-Bennett,Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace, March 1918 (New York: Norton, 1971; 1938), 272;Firuz Kazemzadeh, The Struggle for Transcaucasia, 1917–1921 (New York: PhilosophicalLibrary, 1951), chaps 5–7 and pp. 272–275.

50 The Allied countries recognized Georgia’s independence de jure on the very eve of itsconquest by the Soviet Union in early 1921.

Notes 255

51 Pipes, Formation, 98–107 and chap. 5; Ronald Grigor Suny, The Making of the GeorgianNation (2nd edn, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994; 1988), chap. 9.

52 Enver Pasha, who had briefly flirted with the Bolsheviks in the hope of gaining theirsupport for his return to power in Turkey, defected to the Basmachis in November1921 with the intention of transforming their revolt into a pan-Turkist militarycampaign. In the event, he never gained direct command of more than 3,000fighters, and was killed in a firefight with Red Army troops in 1922.

53 Pipes, Formation, chaps 3 and 4; Taras Hunczak, “The Ukraine under Hetman PavloSkoropadskyi,” and Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak, “The Directory of theUkrainian National Republic,” in Taras Hunczak, ed., The Ukraine, 1917–1921: AStudy in Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1977);Magocsi, Ukraine, 503–507; Arthur E. Adams, “The Great Ukrainian Jacquerie,” andFrank Sysyn, “Nestor Makhno and the Ukrainian Revolution,” in Hunczak, ed., TheUkraine; Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, Islam and the Russian Empire: Reform and Revolutionin Central Asia (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1988;orig. French edn, 1966), chap. 9; Eley, “Remapping the Nation.”

54 In 1918, the Bolsheviks changed their name to Russian Communist Party(Bolsheviks). The terms Bolshevik and Communist will be used interchangeably here.See Pipes, Formation, 110.

55 Ibid., 107–113.56 This section is drawn primarily from the following sources: Walker Connor, The

National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1984), chaps 2–3; Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a CommunalApartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review,vol. 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994), 414–452; Robert Kaiser, The Geography of Nationalism inRussia and the USSR (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), chap. 3 andpassim; Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, chap. 2; Pipes, Formation; Suny, Revenge, chap. 3;Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, The Great Challenge: Nationalities and the Bolshevik State,1917–1930 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1992); Andreas Kappeler, Russland alsVielvölkerreich (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1993), Epilogue.

57 See Kaiser, Geography, 109–110.58 d’Encausse, The Great Challenge, chap. 8.59 Isabelle Kreindler, “A Neglected Source of Lenin’s Nationality Policy,” Slavic Review,

vol. 36, no. 1 (March 1977), 86–100; Robert Geraci, “The Il’minskii System and theControversy over Non-Russian Teachers and Priests in the Middle Volga,” inCatherine Evtuhov, Boris Gasparov, Alexander Ospovat, and Mark von Hagen, eds,Kazan, Moscow, St. Petersburg: Multiple Faces of the Russian Empire (Moscow: OGI, 1997).

60 There was also an irredentist twist to this theme in propaganda directed atBelorussians and Ukrainians living in Poland’s kresy, just across the border from theostensibly sovereign Ukrainian and Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republics.

61 Adam B. Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–1973 (2nd edn, NewYork: Praeger, 1974; 1968), 121–125; Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime(New York: Vintage, 1994), 198–201.

62 The close overlap between the concepts of Soviet and Russian identity reached itsclimax in the aftermath of the Second World War. See Prizel, National Identity, chap. 6.For figures on the increasing dispersal of Russians across the non-Russian republics ofthe USSR during the interwar years, see Kaiser, Geography, 118.

63 Pipes, Formation, 263–293; Prizel, National Identity, 329–330; Suny, Making of theGeorgian Nation, chap. 10 and pp. 272–273.

64 Alexandre A. Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush, Muslim National Communism in theSoviet Union: A Revolutionary Strategy for the Colonial World (Chicago, IL: The University ofChicago Press, 1979), chaps 3–4; Pipes, Formation, 168–170, 260–262; Hans Bräker,“Soviet Policy toward Islam,” in Andreas Kappeler, Gerhard Simon, Georg Brunner,and Edward Allworth, eds, Muslim Communities Reemerge: Historical Perspectives on

256 Notes

Nationality, Politics, and Opposition in the Former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (Durham, NC:Duke University Press, 1994), 162–163.

65 Kaiser, Geography, 110–112; d’Encausse, The Great Challenge, 177–179; Bert G. Fragner,“The Nationalization of the Uzbeks and Tajiks,” in Kappeler et al., MuslimCommunities.

66 Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 30–32.67 Initially, people were free to choose their nationality regardless of parentage, but this

policy did not last long (ibid.).68 See Amir Weiner, “Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating

the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism,” The American Historical Review,vol. 104, no. 4 (October 1999), 1114–1155.

69 A Jewish autonomous district (oblast) was created in the remote Siberian region ofBirobidzhan in 1934. The Jewish population of this bizarre showcase – complete withpublic signs in Yiddish, Yiddish schools, a local Yiddish newspaper, and a Yiddishtheater – never much exceeded 30,000 out of a total population of 100,000.Birobidzhan retains its status as a Jewish autonomous oblast in post-Soviet Russia.Nora Levin, The Jews in the Soviet Union since 1917: Paradox of Survival (vol. 1, New York:New York University Press, 1988), chap. 13, pp. 488–492; Kaiser, Geography, 103, 353.

70 Levin, Jews in the Soviet Union, vol. 1, chaps 4–5, pp. 54–57; Zvi Y. Gitelman, JewishNationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917–1930 (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1972).

71 Having destroyed traditional Jewish cultural institutions, the Yevsekstiia itself becameinternally divided between those who wanted to build a new, Communist form ofYiddish culture and those who advocated complete Jewish assimilation. Gitelman,Jewish Nationality, chap. 6 and pp. 405–440, 497–498.

72 Jeff Veidlinger, “Moscow’s Yiddish Stage” (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 1998).73 See Anthony Smith, Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York

University Press, 1979), 180–182, for a more global elaboration of this theme.74 Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (2nd edn, London: Oxford University

Press, 1968; 1961), chap. 8.75 Additionally, the Straits were to be internationalized. The provision for an Italian

zone was not technically part of the Treaty of Sèvres. David Stevenson, The FirstWorld War and International Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 301–305;Sharp, Versailles, 171.

76 Pipes, Formation, 231–234; Manoug Joseph Somakian, Empires in Conflict: Armenia andthe Great Powers, 1895–1920 (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1995), 204–242;Bülent Gökay, A Clash of Empires: Turkey between Russian Bolshevism and British Imperialism,1918–1923 (London: Tauris, 1997), 83–87, 101–112.

77 Lewis, Emergence, chap. 8; Erik Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I. B. Tauris,1993), chap. 9.

78 See Zürcher, Turkey, 180–181; Selim Deringil, “The Ottoman Origins of KemalistNationalism: Namik Kemal to Mustafa Kemal,” European History Quarterly, vol. 23,no. 2 (April 1993), 165–191.

79 Finney, “An Evil,” 542–543; Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 152–156; Michael R.Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1985), 97–106; Zürcher, Turkey, 176–180; Stanford Shaw and EzelKural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 2: Reform, Revolutionand Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1977), 381.

80 Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill UniversityPress, 1964), chap. 16; Lewis, Emergence, 101–102, 264–279; Shaw and Shaw, History ofthe Ottoman Empire, vol. 2, 375–380, 384–395; Zürcher, Turkey, 180–181. For an enter-taining if unconvincing apologia for the political legacy of Kemalism, see ErnestGellner, Encounters with Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), chap. 7.

Notes 257

81 On the relatively unsuccessful programs of economic modernization in the Arab states– a predicament aggravated by the policies of the mandatory powers – and on theproblems (particularly in the agricultural sector) with Turkey’s étatisme, see Zvi YehudaHershlag, Introduction to the Modern Economic History of the Middle East (2nd edn, Leiden:Brill, 1980; 1964), 167–170, 236–243, and part 7; Gellner, Encounters with Nationalism, 83.

82 The award of a mandate over Syria to France flew in the face of the recommenda-tions of the King–Crane Commission, sent by Woodrow Wilson in the framework ofthe 1919 Paris Peace Conference to assess the state of public opinion in Syria andPalestine. Stevenson, The First World War, 293–299; Howard M. Sachar, The Emergenceof the Middle East, 1914–1924 (New York: Knopf, 1969), chap. 9.

83 See L. Carl Brown, International Politics and the Middle East: Old Rules, Dangerous Game(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 89.

84 As quoted in Isaiah Friedman, The Question of Palestine, 1914–1918: British–Jewish–ArabRelations (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), 279.

85 See Sachar, Emergence, 406.86 For general overviews of the French mandatory regimes in Lebanon and Syria, see

Stephen H. Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon under French Mandate (London: OxfordUniversity Press, 1958); Albert Hourani, Syria and Lebanon: A Political Essay (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1946); Philip Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate: The Politicsof Arab Nationalism 1920–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).

87 See James Gelvin, “Popular Mobilization and the Foundations of Mass Politics inSyria, 1918–1920” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1992).

88 Al-Fatat remained a clandestine organization, but its leaders now established a frontorganization – the Arab Independence Party – to function as their public face. PhilipS. Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus, 1880–1920(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), chap. 4; Muhammad Muslih, TheOrigins of Palestinian Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), chap. 6.

89 The Hashemites’ pan-Arab ambitions generally encompassed only the so-calledFertile Crescent (Iraq, Syria, Transjordan, Palestine, and parts or all of Lebanon). Butpan-Arabist tendencies were also developing in Egypt during the interwar years.Yehoshua Porath, Be-mivchan ha-ma‘aseh ha-politi: Erets-yisrael, achdut arvit, u-mediniyutbritaniyah (In the Trial of Political Action: The Land of Israel, Arab Unity, and BritishPolicy) (Jerusalem: Yad Yitschaq Ben Tsvi, 1985), chap. 1 and pp. 163–174.

90 Sachar, Emergence, 384–388; Bernard Wasserstein, The British in Palestine: The MandatoryGovernment and the Arab–Jewish Conflict, 1917–1929 (London: Royal Historical Society,1978), chap. 2.

91 James L. Gelvin, “The Other Arab Nationalism: Syrian/Arab Populism in itsHistorical and International Contexts,” in James Jankowski and Israel Gershoni, eds,Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press,1997); idem, “Popular Mobilization.”

92 Sachar, Emergence, chap. 9.93 In Transjordan, Emir Abdullah was obliged in 1924 by the British (as well as by jealous

Transjordanian tribal leaders) to get rid of the pan-Arab nationalists from Syria andelsewhere whom he had appointed to his cabinet. Kamal Salibi, The Modern History ofJordan (London: Tauris, 1993), chap. 5; Mary C. Wilson, King Abdullah, Britain and theMaking of Jordan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), chap. 5.

94 Muslih, Palestinian Nationalism, chaps 8–9; Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of thePalestinian–Arab National Movement, 1918–1929 (London: Frank Cass, 1974),Introduction and chap. 2; Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of ModernNational Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 162–175.

95 Neville J. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I (Berkeley, CA: Universityof California Press, 1976); Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory: The Socio-Territorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,1983), chaps 1–2; Kenneth W. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917–1939 (ChapelHill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

258 Notes

96 Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, chap. 4; Gelvin, “Popular Mobilization,”259–260; Muhammad Muslih, “The Rise of Local Nationalism in the ArabEast,” in Rashid Khalidi, Lisa Anderson, Muhammad Muslih, and Reeva S.Simon, eds, The Origins of Arab Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press,1991). On the development of political consciousness among the broader urbanpopulace, see Gelvin, “The Other Arab Nationalism”; idem, “Popular Mobilization,”parts II–III.

97 The distinction between religious and ethnic forms of identity is often virtuallymeaningless – or became so in the course of the developments described here –among non-Muslims in the Middle East. The Ottomans’ millet system had institu-tionalized the vertical segregation of Middle Eastern society along religious andethno-religious lines, and the ethnicization of confessional identity was reinforced inthe late Ottoman and post-Ottoman periods as the nationality principle became theall-encompassing frame of reference for the assertion of collective political rights.See Kemal Karpat, “The Ottoman Ethnic and Confessional Legacy in the MiddleEast,” in Milton J. Esman and Itamar Rabinovich, eds, Ethnicity, Pluralism, and theState in the Middle East (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).

98 The Druze are members of a heterodox Muslim sect.99 This account is particularly indebted to Meir Zamir, The Formation of Modern Lebanon

(Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), chap. 2, pp. 199–215,and passim. See also Kemal Salibi, A House of Many Mansions: The History of LebanonReconsidered (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1988),chaps 1–2, pp. 171–178; Edmond Rabbath, La Formation Historique du Liban Politique etConstitutionel (Beirut: Publications de l’Université Libanaise, 1973), 359–379,420–422; Walid Khalidi, Conflict and Violence in Lebanon (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1979), note 27 to chap. 1; Elie Kedourie, Islam in the Modern World(New York, 1981), 90–91; Bishara al-Khoury, Haqa’iq lubnaniyyah (LebaneseRealities), vol. 1 (Beirut, 1960), 264.

100 Although Arabic was their spoken tongue, the Maronites used a form of Aramaic astheir liturgical language, and cultivated a myth of descent from an ancient people.

101 British forces occupied Syria and Lebanon during the Second World War, transfer-ring administrative control of the territories from the Vichy French to the FreeFrench, but using their own military hegemony and political influence to undermineFrench authority. See Aviel Roshwald, Estranged Bedfellows: Britain and France in theMiddle East during the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990);A.B. Gaunson, The Anglo-French Clash in Lebanon and Syria, 1940–1945 (London:Macmillan, 1987); Major-General Sir Edward Spears, Fulfilment of a Mission: Syriaand Lebanon, 1941–1944 (London: Seeley, Service and Cooper/Hamden, CT:Archon Books, 1977).

102 Cited in Walid Khalidi, Conflict and Violence in Lebanon: Confrontation in the Middle East(Cambridge, MA: Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, 1979), 162,no. 27

103 The Alawites are another Muslim sectarian group, concentrated in the northwesternSyrian district of Latakia.

104 At the same time, it must be emphasized that patterns of support for, and opposi-tion to, the Syrian Arab nationalists among the Druze were closely linked tointernal clan rivalries, suggesting that here too, Arab nationalism served as anideological umbrella for coalition-building among distinct communal interestsrather than constituting a truly cohesive, trans-communal identity. Khoury, Syriaand the French Mandate, chap. 20. On the dynamics of minority politics in manda-tory Syria, see also Itamar Rabinovich, “The Compact Minorities and the SyrianState, 1918–1945,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 14, no. 4 (October 1979),693–712.

105 Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, chaps 2, 6–7, 10, 17–22. For critical analyses ofFrench policy by contemporaneous observers, see Robert Montagne, “French Policy

Notes 259

in North Africa and in Syria,” International Affairs, vol. 16, no. 2 (March–April 1937),263–279; Pierre Rondot, “L’expérience du mandat français en Syrie et au Liban(1918–45),” Revue des Droits Internationaux Publiques (1948), 387–409.

106 Reeva Simon, “The Imposition of Nationalism: Iraq, 1921–1941,” in Jankowskiand Gershoni, eds, Rethinking Nationalism.

107 See Gabriel Ben-Dor, “Ethnopolitics and the Middle Eastern State,” in Esman andRabinovich, eds, Ethnicity, Pluralism and the State.

7 Old Elites and Radical Challengers in the New Nation-States,1918–1939

1 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983),48.

2 Gellner’s own writings on the Middle East point in this direction. See for exampleErnest Gellner, “Tribalism and the State in the Middle East,” in Philip S. Khouryand Joseph Kostiner, eds, Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East (Berkeley and LosAngeles, CA: University of California Press, 1990).

3 Arno Mayer uses the concept of the persistence of the old regime to explain thepolitical dynamic leading up to the outbreak of the First World War in Europe.Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime (New York: Random House, 1981). I amnot convinced by Mayer’s attempt to identify anachronistic socio-economic interestsas the key determinants of the short-term diplomacy and decision-making of theJuly 1914 crisis. However, I do find value in the notion that long-term patterns ofpolitical and institutional development can be shaped by the struggle of old elites tomaintain their hegemony through the manipulation of modernization processes.See Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes (New York: Meridian, 1955).

4 Max Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 3 (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), chap. 11.5 For an insightful, comparative exploration of the role of imperial legacies in shaping

nationalist politics, see also Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen, eds, After Empire –Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, andHabsburg Empires (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997).

6 This section is particularly indebted to the incisive analysis in Carol Skalnik Leff,National Conflict in Czechoslovakia: The Making and Remaking of a State, 1918–1987(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). It also draws upon the followingsources: Helmut Slapnicka, “Die neue Staat und die bürokratische Kontinuität. DieEntwicklung der Verwaltung 1918–1938,” in Karl Bosl, ed., Die demokratisch-parlamen-tarische Struktur der ersten Tschechoslowakischen Republik (Munich and Vienna:Oldenbourg, 1975); R.W. Seton-Watson, The New Slovakia (Prague: Fr. Borovy, 1924);Owen V. Johnson, Slovakia 1918–1938: Education and the Making of a Nation (Boulder,CO: East European Monographs, 1985); Derek Sayer, The Coasts of Bohemia: A CzechHistory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 170–176; Peter Burian,“Demokratie und Parlamentarismus in der Ersten Tschechoslowakischen Republik,”in Hans-Erich Volkmann, ed., Die Krise des Parlamentarismus in Ostmitteleuropa zwischenden beiden Weltkriegen (Marburg: J.G. Herder-Institut, 1967).

7 See Leff, Czechoslovakia, 192–193. The Czech leadership was convinced that overtime, the process of economic development and political integration would lead theSlovak masses to embrace the cultural and administrative centralism of theirCzechophile vanguard. See Victor Mamatey, “The Development of CzechoslovakDemocracy, 1920–1938,” in Victor Mamatey and Radomir Luza, eds, A History ofthe Czechoslovak Republic, 1918–1948 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1973), 120–126.

8 István Deák, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg OfficerCorps, 1848–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 208–209.

9 Jonathan Zorach, “The Nationality Problem in the Czechoslovak Army between theTwo World Wars,” East Central Europe, 5, Pt. 2 (1978), 169–185.

260 Notes

10 See Fred Hahn, “Masaryk and the Germans,” in Harry Hanak, ed., T.G. Masaryk(1850–1937), Vol. 3: Statesman and Cultural Force (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989).

11 In his keen assessment of Czech–Slovak relations, published in 1924, R.W. Seton-Watson was critical of Czech unwillingness to compromise the principles ofeconomic efficiency for the sake of sustaining the development of a native Slovakindustrial base. By the same token, though, he emphasized that:

the suggestion that “Prague” regards Slovakia as a colony to be exploited, anddeliberately aims at destroying its economic and financial independence … is agrotesque calumny, which none the less finds credulous believers among theinexperienced Slovak masses and even a section of the intelligentsia.

(Seton-Watson, The New Slovakia, p. 96)

12 Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1992), 15–16.

13 For a debate about interwar Czechoslovakia’s significance as a touchstone for thegeneral problems of the East European nation-state, see F. Gregory Campbell, GaleStokes, and Roman Szporluk, “Discussion,” Slavic Review, vol. 44, no. 1 (1985), 1–29.

14 This section draws on the following sources: Ivo Banac, The National Question inYugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press,1984), 375–378; Lenard Cohen, “The Social Background and Recruitment ofYugoslav Political Elites, 1918–48,” in Allen H. Barton, Bogdan Denitch, and CharlesKadushin, eds, Opinion-Making Elites in Yugoslavia (New York: Praeger, 1973), 59–62;Jozo Tomasevich, Peasants, Politics, and Economic Change in Yugoslavia (Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press, 1955), 241–260; Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 209; JohnLampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1996), 156–159, 171–173, 189–194, and chap. 7. For an attempt toplace the decisions and policies of the Serbian leadership in the best light possible, seeAlex N. Dragnich, The First Yugoslavia: Search for a Viable Political System (Stanford, CA:Hoover Institution Press, 1983) and idem, “The Anatomy of a Myth: SerbianHegemony,” Slavic Review, vol. 50, no. 3 (Fall 1991), 659–662.

15 Peasants within the pre-First World War boundaries of Serbia and Montenegroalready had full title to their land, and therefore were not led to expect any dramaticchange in property law.

16 Tomasevich, Peasants, Politics, chap. 18. Although the formation of cooperative soci-eties combined with the general rise in grain prices to strengthen the Croatian andSlovenian rural economies in the late 1920s, the Great Depression wiped out thesegains in the following decade. Lampe, Yugoslavia, 146–148 and 168–170.

17 Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, vol. 2 (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1982), 410–411; Andrzej Korbonski, “Poland: 1918–1990,” inJoseph Held, ed., The Columbia History of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1992), 235–237. Thanks to its history of de factoautonomy under the Habsburgs, Galicia was able to contribute disproportionately tothe personnel and juridical and institutional framework of the Polish republic. SeeJózef Buszko, “Das soziale und politische Erbe der österreichisch-ungarischenMonarchie im unabhängigen Polen,” Österreichische Osthefte, vol. 36 (1994), no. 4,741–751.

18 This section draws upon: Antony Polonsky, Politics in Independent Poland, 1921–1939:The Crisis of Constitutional Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), chaps 2–4, 6,and pp. 128–136, 358–371; Joseph Rothschild, Piłsudski’s Coup D’Etat (New York andLondon: Columbia University Press, 1966), chaps 3, 10, 13, 15, 18, and passim;Andrzej Garlicki, Józef Piłsudski, 1867–1935 (ed., abridged, and trans. from the Polishby John Coutrouvidis, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), chaps 7–9; Davies, God’sPlayground, 421–426.

Notes 261

19 Józef Piłsudski, Joseph Piłsudski: The Memories of a Polish Revolutionary and Soldier (trans.and ed. D.R. Gillie, London: Faber & Faber, 1931), 369–371.

20 The legionnaires’ typical background as volunteers who had never studied in a mili-tary academy did not equip them well for long-term planning and militarymodernization. Polonsky, Politics, 202.

21 The cult of the Legion was even institutionalized: an Institute of Legionary Studieswas established in 1934. Polonsky, Politics, 354.

22 Piłsudski was named first marshal of Poland in 1920.23 The first years of the Sanacja had witnessed an improvement in economic conditions,

but the onset of the Depression had wiped out these gains. Rothschild, Piłsudski’s CoupD’Etat, chap. 15.

24 Philip Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus 1880–1920(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), chaps 1–2; Hanna Batatu, The OldSocial Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 1978), chap. 8; Weber, Economy and Society, chap. 11.

25 Philip Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism 1920–1945(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), chap. 11.

26 Ibid., chap. 10; C. Ernest Dawn, From Ottomanism to Arabism: Essays on the Origins of ArabNationalism (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 160–174; Hisham Sharabi,Arab Intellectuals and the West: The Formative Years, 1875–1914 (Baltimore, MD andLondon: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), 127.

27 Khoury, Syria, 564 and 603.28 See Dhuqan Qarqut, Tatawwur al-harakah al-wataniyyah fi Suriya, 1920–1939 (The

development of the nationalist movement in Syria, 1920–1939) (Beirut: Dar al-Tali‘ah lil-Tiba‘ah wa-al-Nashr, 1975), 104–105.

29 In their land-tenure and tax-collection policies, the Sharifians were following in thewake of precedents set by the British imperial authorities during their wartime andimmediate postwar period of direct rule over Iraq. The British, in turn, had regardedtheir attempts to co-opt traditional elites as a systematization of Ottoman practices.Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq, 1914–1932 (London: Ithaca Press, 1976), chap. 6;Charles Issawi, The Middle East Economy: Decline and Recovery (Princeton, NJ: MarcusWiener Publishers, 1995), 154.

30 Batatu, Social Classes, chaps 8 and 10.31 Ibid., chap. 10; Phebe Marr, The Modern History of Iraq (Boulder, CO:

Westview/London: Longman, 1985), 69–70.32 Reeva S. Simon, Iraq between the Two World Wars: The Creation and Implementation of a

Nationalist Ideology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 119–123; DanielSilverfarb, Britain’s Informal Empire in the Middle East: A Case Study of Iraq, 1929–1941(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), chap. 4. The Assyrians, uprooted fromwhat became Turkish territory in the wake of their unsuccessful pro-Allied revoltagainst the Ottomans during the First World War, had been resettled in Iraq by theBritish.

33 Simon, Iraq between the Wars, chap. 4; William Cleveland, The Making of an ArabNationalist: Ottomanism and Arabism in the Life and Thought of Sati‘ al-Husri (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1971), 38–41, 62–63; Bassam Tibi, Arab Nationalism:Between Islam and the Nation-State (3rd edn, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 119,142–154. Al-Husri emphasized that compulsory military service had a vital role toplay in complementing and completing the educational task of the school system byinculcating youth from all regions with a commitment to the nation as the object ofsupreme loyalty. See Sati‘ al-Husri, “Al-khidmah al-‘askariyyah wa al-tarbiyah al-‘amah” (Military service and general education), in Al-a‘mal al-qawmiyyah li-Sati‘al-Husri (The Nationalist Works of Sati‘ al-Husri), vol. 2: Ahadith fi-al-tarbiyah wa-al-ijtima‘ (Discussions in Education and Society) (Beirut: Markaz Dirasat al-Wahdahal-Arabiyyah, 1985).

262 Notes

34 Simon, Iraq between the Wars, chap. 4. See excerpt from Sami Shawkat’s “Profession ofDeath” (a speech delivered in 1933) in Sylvia Haim, Arab Nationalism, 97–99.

35 Khoury, Syria, 471–476.36 For a discussion of the possibility of reconciling modernization with traditional

Middle Eastern social structures and traditions, see Samir Khalaf, “On Loyalties andSocial Change,” in Georges Sabagh, ed., The Modern Economic and Social History of theMiddle East in its World Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

37 Philip Khoury, “The Paradoxical in Arab Nationalism: Interwar Syria Revisited,”and Reeva S. Simon, “The Imposition of Nationalism on a Non-Nation State: TheCase of Iraq during the Interwar Period, 1921–1941,” in James Jankowski and IsraelGershoni, eds, Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1997).

38 Albert Hourani, “A Note on Revolutions in the Arab World,” in Albert Hourani, TheEmergence of the Modern Middle East (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University ofCalifornia Press, 1981), 71.

39 See Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 1999),chap. 1.

40 My thanks to Jerry Muller for drawing my attention to this point.41 On Romania, see p. 170 of this book. On Estonia, see Toivo U. Raun, Estonia and the

Estonians (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1987), chap. 8. On Latvia’s transi-tion to ethno-chauvinistic authoritarianism in the 1930s, see Andrejs Plakans, TheLatvians: A Short History (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1995), 132–138.

8 Conclusion

1 See Patrick B. Finney, “‘An Evil for All Concerned’: Great Britain and MinorityProtection after 1919,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 30, no. 3 (July 1995),533–551.

2 See Richard L. Rudolph and David F. Good, eds, Nationalism and Empire: The HabsburgMonarchy and the Soviet Union (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).

3 Renzo de Felice’s analytical distinction between fascist movement and fascist regimeoffers an interesting point of comparison here. Renzo de Felice and Michael A.Ledeen, Fascism: An Informal Introduction to its Theory and Practice (English version ofIntervista sul fascismo) (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1976), chap. 3.

4 This idea also manifests itself in the work of contemporary theorists of nationalismsuch as Ernest Gellner.

5 Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).6 Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in idem, The Proper Study of Mankind

(London: Chatto & Windus, 1997). See also Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life(New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 225–228.

7 For some imaginative approaches to the conflict between state authority and nationalidentity, see Gidon Gottlieb, Nation against State (New York: Council on ForeignRelations Press, 1993).

Notes 263

1848 revolutions 10, 14, 34

Abkhazians 173Abduh, Muhammad 56, 65Abdülhamit II, Sultan 31, 58–60, 62, 106Abdullah, Emir 188, 258 no. 93Adrianople see EdirneAfghani, Jamal al-Din, 56Afghanistan 107Africa 140, 221Agudat Israel 123Ahad Ha‘am (Asher Ginzberg) 141, 143,

248 no. 65al-‘Ahd 64, 112, 114, 153–4, 189–90Ahmet, Ağaoğlu 62, 107Akçura, Yusuf 62, 107Alash Orda 99–100Alawites 28, 194, 259 no. 103Albania 126, 134; ethnic Albanians 59,

106Alexander, King 138, 206Alexander III, Tsar 37Ali, Hüseyinzade 62‘Ali, Kurd 113Allenby, General 112, 144, 153Alliance Israelite Universelle 165Allied and Associated Powers 74, 87, 89,

219; and East European nationalities116, 128–46, 155, 159–67; policy oftowards Habsburg empire 73, 79, 128,157, 159–60; and Ottomanempire/Turkey 106–7, 111–13, 162,172, 183–6; and Russia 90, 171–2

Alp, Tekin (Moïse Cohen) 68alphabet: Arabic 177; Cyrillic 86, 127,

177; Latin 86, 177, 186Alsace-Lorraine 76Anatolia 28, 30, 65, 106, 109–10, 185–6animism 19, 20

Ankara 185Anti-Semitism 36, 37, 39–41, 43, 82, 87,

139, 144, 145, 164–71, 210–11, 230no. 12

Arab National Congress 65Arab Revolt 113–14, 152–54, 188, 212Arabic 26, 28, 57, 61, 63, 65, 153, 186,

195, 259 no. 100Arabism 65–7, 190Arabs 4, 28, 59–68, 105–7, 111–15, 145,

152–54, 186–97, 211–17, 219Armenians 8, 21, 25–6, 28–32, 52–3, 54,

55, 59–63, 91, 101–2, 108–10, 128,171–3, 179, 183–5, 193, 219

Asia 221; see also Central AsiaAssyrians 214, 262 no. 32Ausgleich 11Austria 10, 11, 12, 42, 46, 72–3, 83, 85,

91, 123, 157, 162, 201; Reichsrat 16,42, 43, 72–3, 79–80, 82, 151, 201–2;see also Habsburg empire

Austria–Hungary see Habsburg empireAustrian Social Democratic Party 16–18Austro-Marxism 16–18, 55, 80Austro-Prussian War 11Avars 26Azerbaijan 25–7, 53, 98, 100, 107, 171–3,

179

Ba‘albek 112Ba‘ath 215Baghdad 63, 190, 195Baku 25, 53; Congress 177Balfour Declaration 144, 187, 251 no. 98Balkan Wars (1912–13) 28, 32, 34, 47, 63,

104–7, 109, 125, 167Balkans 10, 22, 28, 30, 32, 47, 104, 134,

197Baltic lands 21, 22, 92, 171

Index

Banat 169Bar Kochba 182Basmachis 108, 173, 256 no. 52Basra 64Battle of the White Mountain 10Batum 25Bauer, Otto 17–18Bedouin 109, 112, 114, 153Beirut 64, 112, 193Belgrade 48, 88, 125, 127, 205–6Belorussia 20, 20–4, 50, 52, 55, 94, 101–3,

118, 164, 168, 171Ben-Gurion, David 145Beneš, Edvard 79–80, 129–32, 147Berlin 72, 117, 128, 140, 142, 150Berlin, Isaiah 222–3Berlin–Baghdad railway 31Beseler, General 117Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald von 117Birobidzhan 257 no. 69Bismarck, Otto von 8Blunt, Wilfrid 235Bohemia 10, 12, 14, 16, 42, 45, 71, 75,

79–82, 89, 129, 161; see alsoCzechoslovakia; Czechs

Bolsheviks 51, 53, 54, 55–6, 75, 77, 90,93–5, 97, 100–4, 108, 119–20, 131,148, 159, 162, 163, 171–83, 185

Borochov, Ber 232 no. 30Bosnia see Bosnia-HerzegovinaBosnia-Herzegovina 13, 14, 27, 34, 75, 85,

87, 126, 205, 229 no. 66; Mlada Bosna(Young Bosnia) 85

Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of 77, 89, 121, 127,148, 172, 239 no. 44

Britain 5, 7, 81, 105–7, 109, 111–13, 127,130, 133–4, 138–9, 146, 148, 161,165–6, 172, 183, 218; and Arab Revolt152–4; as mandatory power in MiddleEast 144, 185, 187–97, 213, 216; andZionism 140–6

Brno (Brünn) 83; Brünn Congress 17–18Brusilov offensive 72, 90Bucharest 170Budapest 46, 47, 85, 89, 159, 201Buddhism 19Bug 162Bukhara 26, 56, 100–1Bukovina 12Bulgaria 30, 106–7, 125–7, 162;

Communism in 126Bund (General Jewish Workers’ Alliance)

25, 54, 55, 140Buryats 19

Byzantine empire 19, 28

Cairo 64, 65, 153Caliphate 32, 66, 105–6, 189Capitulations 30, 63, 108Caporetto, Battle of 75Casement, Sir Roger 128Caspian 25Catherine the Great 20, 99Catholicism 13, 46, 78, 90, 120, 130, 136,

192, 203, 206, 209Caucasus 23, 26, 91, 98, 110, 180, 183Central Asia 19, 20, 23, 26, 27, 32, 62, 65,

91, 98–100, 109, 114, 177, 183, 185Central Powers 39, 77, 81–2, 89, 104, 122,

126, 128, 142, 146–7, 149–52, 155,157, 172

Chechens 26Chelyabinsk 148China 62, 183Christians 29–31, 60, 61, 66Chuvash 177Cilicia 185–6Circassians 23clergy: clericalism 85–6; Islamic 29, 31, 56,

99, 108; opposition to 85; Slovene 86Codreanu, Corneliu 217Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)

(Young Turks) 33, 34, 57–68, 104–113,141, 152–3, 183, 185, 191, 211–13, 233no. 42

Communists see BolsheviksComte, Auguste 36, 233 no. 42Congress of Berlin 30, 53, 254 no. 32Constantinople 28, 229 no. 58; see also

IstanbulCopenhagen 142Corfu 126, 134, 136; Corfu Declaration

137Cossacks 24, 97, 228 no. 47cotton 26Croatia 10, 11, 13–14, 46–8, 67, 71, 75,

84–90, 114, 132–8, 158, 160, 204–6,217; Croatian Peasant Party 46–7, 48,204–6; ethnic Croats 12, 13–14, 44,46–8, 68, 74, 82, 84–90, 125, 127,204–6, 219–20; Sabor 47, 85, 87–8; seealso South Slavs; Yugoslavia;Yugoslavism

Curzon Line 162Czechoslovakia 4, 44, 67, 80, 89, 129–32,

146, 149, 157, 160–3, 170, 199, 201–3,

Index 265

205–6, 216–17, 219, 221, 261 no. 11;Communist Party of 80; see also Czechs

Czechs 10, 15, 16, 42, 51, 54, 67–8, 72–3,75–84, 128, 147–9, 157, 170, 201–3,205, 216, 219, 261 no. 11; AgrarianParty 78; Czech Club 18, 202; CzechUnion 79, 80, 82, 130; CzechoslovakLegion 77, 130, 147–9; Czech(Czechoslovak) National Commitee79–80; Czechoslovak National Council129–32, 146, 157, 161; NationalSocialists 75, 78, 237 no. 28; OldCzechs 42, 43; Social Democrats 18,79, 83, 239 no. 44; Young Czechs 42,43, 45, 68, 78; see also Czechoslovakia;Bohemia; Moravia

Da̧browski, General Jan Henryk 149Daghestan 26Dalmatia 12, 13, 47, 48, 75, 77, 85, 87–8,

134, 135Damascus 63, 112, 154, 189–94Dashnaktsutiun (Dashnaks) 52–3, 55, 59,

101, 109, 128dhimmis 29Dmowski, Roman 36, 39–42, 43, 52, 61,

138–40, 150, 157, 161, 164–5, 168,207, 210, 217, 229 no. 1, 252 no. 19

Drahomaniv, Mykhailo 52Dreyfus Affair 35Druze 192–5, 220, 259 no. 98Družina 147Dubrovnik 47, 84Durkheim, Émile 61

Eastern Crisis (1875–78) 31, 254 no. 32Edirne (Adrianople) 28, 106Egypt 56, 105, 109, 128, 143, 154, 188Endecja (Polish National Democrats) 36,

43, 61, 68, 139, 165, 168, 209–11, 217,230 no. 9

Enlightenment 20, 43Enver Pasha 105, 106, 109, 256 no. 52Estonia 20, 22–5, 159, 164, 171, 217;

League of Veterans 217ethnicity passim; and Habsburg empire

8–19, 71–90, 125–38; and federalism 3,27, 37, 51–2, 55–6, 65, 67, 80, 88,93–4, 100, 114–15, 138, 146, 164, 170,171–83, 196–7, 219; and First WorldWar 70–115, 218–23 and passim; andinternationalism 101–4, 177–9, 183;and Islam 25, 60, 98–101, 186–95, 212,

219; and Marxism 8, 16–18, 49–56,171–83; and Ottoman empire 28–33,57–68, 100–1, 105–15; and Russianempire 19–27, 49–57, 90–104; andSoviet Union 171–83; see alsonationalism

European Union (EU) 222–3extraterritorial autonomy 17–18, 55–6,

100, 156, 181

Faisal 112, 153–4, 187–91, 193, 195Falkenhayn, General Erich von 142Farsi (Persian) 26, 28, 61, 186fascism 170, 206, 209–10, 214–15, 217al-Fatat 64, 112–14, 153–4, 189–91fedaîler 107de Felice, Renzo 263 no. 3fez 186Finland 19, 22, 25, 50–1, 91–2, 94, 128,

147, 159, 239, no. 51First World War passim; economic aspects

and consequences of 108, 110–11,119–20, 126, 156, 170–1, 193, 207, 242no. 88; monographic literature on 4;and Habsburg empire 71–90, 114–15;in the Middle East 104–15; andOttoman defeat 58; and Ottomanempire 104–15; Ottoman entry into104, 105, 107; outbreak of 19, 69, 108,142; and Russia 23, 90–104, 114–15;and separatist movements 116–55

France 5, 7, 11, 31, 35, 76, 106, 112–13,127, 130, 132–3, 139, 143, 146–8, 151,165, 185–97, 206, 211–12, 214, 216,218

Frank, Josip 46Frankists 46, 48, 68, 84–5, 87, 206, 217Franz Ferdinand, Archduke 14, 84Franz Joseph, Kaiser 72, 88Free Corps 159, 171French Revolution 14

Galicia 12, 14, 15, 24, 36, 39, 52, 71, 72,79, 81, 91, 116, 128, 149, 151–2,162–4, 169, 253 no. 24, 261 no. 17

Galiev, Mirza Sultan 180–1Gallipoli 107, 111Garlicki, Andrzej 152Gasprinsky, Ismail-bey 56–7, 100de Gaulle, General Charles 151Gellner, Ernest 198–200, 263 no. 4Geneva 58

266 Index

Georgia 20, 25, 101–2, 115, 128, 171–3,179–80

Germans 8, 10, 148, 165; Austro-Germans8, 12–13, 15–16, 18, 28, 43, 45, 72, 74,76, 79, 82–3, 89, 161, 201, 218–19; ofBaltic region 20, 22, 25, 92, 103;culture and language 4, 10, 45, 61, 85,119–24, 130, 141; in Czechoslovakia162; in Poland 168–9; in Romania 169;in Russia 91; in Silesia 162–3; inSlovenia 86

Germany 5, 7, 8, 11, 19, 23, 24, 72, 96,137, 142–3, 145, 147–8, 157, 162–3,183, 207, 211, 214, 217; Center Party122; conduct of war 82, 90, 92, 103,122, 126–7, 128, 218; and Habsburgempire 74, 81–4, 89, 129, 131;occupation of Eastern Europe 36,72–3, 94–5, 101–3, 116–25, 144, 155,159, 164, 171–2, 182–3, 207; andOttoman empire 61, 63, 105, 128, 142,171–2, 183, 213, 241–2 no. 81; Polishregions of 40; Reichstag 120, 122, 124;and Zionism 142–3

Gökalp, Ziya 60–1, 68, 113, 186Great Depression 170, 216, 220Greece 125–6, 134–5, 185–6; ethnic

Greeks 8, 28–9, 31, 59, 61–2, 106,108–10, 186, 219

Greek Catholics 28, 193Green Cadres 87–8, 138, 162Greenfeld, Liah 203

Habsburg empire 3, 7, 23, 24, 34, 96, 104,117, 122, 146–7, 155, 160; break-up of157, 169, 183, 199, 201; conduct ofwar 71–90, 125–7, 149–51; ethnicpolitics in 8–19, 27, 33, 42–49, 67,114–15, 116, 125, 128–38, 199, 201,218–19; example of 61; role of military39, 73–8, 149–50, 207–8, 210; Trialism46, 85; see also Austria; Hungary

Halka Doğru 61, 109Haller, General Jozef 151, 207Hanák, Péter, 81, 83, 88Hanioğlu, Șükrü, 63Harbiye 30, 59, 63, 213, 216Hašek, Jaroslav 75Hashemites 153, 188–9, 212, 214al-Hashimi, Yasin 113Hebrew 25, 54, 91, 122–3, 141–2, 166,

182Hejaz 64, 105, 112–13, 152–4

Helphand (Parvus), Alexander 242 no. 88Herzl, Theodor 140Hetmanate 24Hindenburg, General 117Hlasists 45, 132, 231 no. 14Hlinka, Father Andrej 203Hobsbawm, Eric 239 no. 44Holy Roman Emperor 10Hroch, Miroslav 2Hromada 55, 94Hrushevsky, Mykhailo 52, 53, 97Hungary 4, 10, 11–12, 13–14, 18, 44, 46,

47, 72–3, 75, 77–8, 82–5, 89, 132,157–9, 162–3, 169–70, 201–2, 206;Hungarian Soviet Republic 159; see alsoHabsburg empire; Magyars

Hus, Jan 43–4al-Husri, Sati‘ 113, 214, 262 no. 33Hussein, Sharif 64, 112, 152–54, 187, 190

Ibn Khaldun 65–6Illyrianism see YugoslavismIl’minskii, Nikolai I. 177imperialism, overseas 174, 177, 187–97,

211–16, 221, 244 no. 6India 107, 111, 128, 154, 233 no. 36, 250

no. 97, 251 no. 100Inquiry, The (American) 160–1, 243 no. 2intelligentsia 4, 14, 34–69, 53–7, 67–9,

114, 159, 178; Arab 63–8, 189;Azerbaijani 27; Belorussian 24; CentralAsian 27; Croat 46–8, 67, 206; Czech16, 44–5, 203; Georgian 102; Jewish141; Kazakh 99–100, 219; Muslim 33,56–7, 98–101, 180–1; Polish 24, 38, 40;Russian 27, 90–1, 141; Serb 67, 127;Slovak 44, 67, 220; Swedish 24; Tatar27, 56–7, 67, 98–100; Turkish 58–63;Yugoslav 47–8

Iran 107Iraq (Mesopotamia) 28, 63–4, 105, 109,

111–14, 127, 153–4, 187–90, 195, 199,207, 211–17

Ireland 128Iron Guard 170, 217Islam 19, 20, 25–7, 56–7, 60, 65–6,

98–101, 152–3, 186–95, 212, 219Israel 140, 142Istanbul 28, 58, 59, 61–2, 64, 100, 105–7,

113, 172, 185, 211, 216, 229 no. 58; seealso Constantinople

Istria 13, 88Italy 5, 11, 74–6, 147, 212, 214, 217;

Index 267

ethnic Italians 12, 77; and Ottomanempire 106–7, 185, 257 no. 75; andSouth Slavs 74, 88, 133, 135, 137, 206;Young Italy 128

Ivan the Terrible 19, 27

Jadids 56–7, 62, 67, 98, 100–1, 114, 173,180

Jaffa 142janissaries 29Japan 34, 222, 229 no. 1Jebel Druze 194Jemal Pasha 105, 111–13, 142, 189, 193,

245 no. 15Jews 140–5, 164–70; in Britain 144–5,

165–6; Conjoint Committee 144, 166;and Czechs 43, 82; in France 165;under German occupation 118, 122–5;in Habsburg empire 12, 18, 72; JewishAgency 187; Jewish National Fund191–2; Jewish Socialist Labor Party(SERP) 53; Orthodoxy 123; inOttoman empire 28–9, 31, 68; inPalestine 141, 143, 145, 187–8, 191–2;in Poland 36–41, 122–5, 139, 140,164–9, 210; in Romania 169–70, 217,254 no. 32; in Russian empire 21, 23,25, 50, 53–4, 91, 94, 122–3, 140–4,165; in Slovakia 201; and South Slavs87; in Soviet Union 182; in UnitedStates 165–6; see also Bund; Hebrew;Yiddish; Zionism

jihad 106Jordan see Transjordan

Karadjordjević 48Karl I, Kaiser 72–3, 78–9, 82, 86, 115,

137, 157Karolyi, Count Mihaly 158Kaunas 117–18, 124al-Kawakibi, ‘Abd al-Rahman 235 no. 72Kazakhs 19, 99–100Kazakhstan 181Kazan 19, 27, 180Kemal, Mustafa (Kemal Atatürk) 58, 60,

110–11, 173, 183–6, 213, 221Kemal, Namik 233 no. 48Keylor, William 161Khan, Ahmad 233 no. 36Kharkov 36Khiva 26Khoury, Philip 211Khuen-Héderváry 46, 47

Kiev 93, 95, 97, 162Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes see

YugoslaviaKirghizistan 181Klofáč, Vaclav 78–9Kokand 100Koran 65korenizatsiia 178, 181, 181–3Korošec, Anton 86Kramář, Karel 42, 43, 68, 78–9, 131kresy 168–9, 256 no. 60Kurds 28, 61, 62, 68, 106, 109–10, 185–6,

195, 221Kvapil, Jaroslav 82

Lansing, Robert 161Latvia 20, 22, 24–5, 91–2, 94, 101, 103–4,

159, 164, 171, 241 no. 75Lausanne, Treaty of 185Le Bon, Gustave 58League of Nations 113, 144, 163, 165–7,

185, 187, 253 no. 25Lebanon 28, 111, 186–8, 192–4, 214–15;

National Pact 194legions 71, 116, 146–55, 200, 216; Arab

152–4, 189, 207, 212–14, 216, 251 no.100; Czechoslovak 77, 130, 147–9;Finnish 147; Georgian 147; Polish 128,139, 149–52, 154, 207–11, 213, 216;South Slav 77, 147, 249 no. 75;Ukrainian 128, 147

Lenin (Ulyanov), Vladimir Ilyich 92, 94,103–4, 119, 173–4, 176, 179–80, 183,222

liberalism 1, 5, 6, 12, 35, 43, 47, 48, 90,94, 105–6, 131–2, 134, 146, 155,160–1, 210, 213, 216–17, 220–3; seealso nationalism, civic; nationalism,liberal

Liberia 199Libya 104, 106List, Friedrich 242 no. 88Lithuania 24, 36, 52, 117–25, 159, 162,

164, 168; see also Polish-LithuanianCommonwealth

Liulevicius, Vejas G., 119, 124Ljubljana (Laibach) 85Lloyd George, David 161, 163Lodz 24London 130, 135, 144, 146, 177, 220Lublin 117Ludendorff, General Erich 117Lutheranism 25

268 Index

Luxemburg, Rosa 37Lwów (Lvov, Lviv, Lemberg) 52, 163, 165

Macedonia 13, 106, 126, 135Maček, Vladko 206McMahon, Sir Henry 153Maffie 79–80, 129–31Magyars 11–12, 14, 16, 34, 72, 75–7, 82,

89, 148, 162, 169–70, 199, 201–2,218–19; see also Hungary

Maisalun, Battle of 187, 190–2Manchester 143Maronites 28, 192–4, 220, 259 no. 100Marxism 16–18, 25, 37, 53–6, 54, 102–3,

140, 171–83Masaryk, Tomáš 42–5, 46, 47, 52, 67–8,

78–80, 129–32, 146, 147, 157, 202,206, 221; and Jews 230 no. 12

Mazzini, Giuseppe 128Mecca 112, 152Medina 152Mehmet V, Sultan 58Mensheviks 51, 53, 54, 92, 98, 102, 104,

115, 148, 172–3, 179Mesopotamia see IraqMeštrović, Ivan 133, 146, 247–8 no. 52Middle Ages 20Middle East see Arabs; Ottoman empire;

Zionism, etc.millets 29, 31–2, 59–60, 195, 259 no. 97minorities 156–97, 216 and passim; treaties

regarding status of 164–7, 169, 219,253 no. 25

Minsk 94missionaries 20Montenegro 106, 125Moravia 12, 14, 43, 45, 79–80, 83, 89; see

also Czechoslovakia; CzechsMoscow 21, 54, 92, 173, 179, 185Mount Lebanon see LebanonMudros, Armistice of 172, 183Mülkiye 30, 59, 63, 113, 211Musavat 100, 107Muscovy 19, 20Muslims 107, 188–9; in Ottoman

empire//Middle East 28–33, 59–67,105–6, 108, 152, 188–9, 192–5; inRussian empire/Soviet Union 20, 23,25–7, 53, 56–7, 62, 67, 95, 98–101,107, 114, 128, 173, 180–1; inYugoslavia 12, 13, 84–5; see also Islam

nagodba 11

Nagorno-Karabakh 25Najaf 112Napoleon 128, 149Narodnaya Volya 36, 52narodniki 14, 51Narutowicz, Gabriel 168, 208–9National Communism 180–1nationalism passim; civic 5–6, 35, 44–5,

50–2, 59, 62, 67–9, 174, 186, 196,220–3; ethnic 4, 5–6, 35, 43–5, 65–9and passim; integral/chauvinist 35, 50,60–2, 67–9, 196, 209–11, 213–17,220–3, 229 no. 2; liberal 6, 10, 35, 40,50–1, 55, 67–9, 131, 145–6, 155,159–64, 167–71, 196, 217, 220–3 andpassim; and self-determination 92–4,114, 120, 136, 146, 155, 159–63, 172,174–83, 198, 203, 218–23 and passim;terminology 5–6; theories of 1–3,198–200, 203, 221–3; see also ethnicity

nationalities see ethnicity; nationalismNazism 214, 217Neo-Slavism 43, 52, 67, 131New Economic Policy (NEP) 178, 181The New Europe 130, 161Nicholas I, Tsar 50Nicholas II, Tsar 22, 88, 91Nietzsche, Friedrich 203Niš 125, 134North Africa 30, 34, 107

Ober Ost 117–24Obrenović 48oil 25, 213Oppenheim, Baron Max von 242 no. 81Orthodox Christianity 19, 20, 23, 28, 30,

32, 52; Bulgarian 32; Greek 186, 193;Russian 20, 50, 177; Serbian 32, 86,136, 204

Osman I 28Ossetians 173Ottoman empire 3, 7, 8, 14, 23, 25, 26, 27,

34, 47, 52–3, 57, 91, 125, 128, 140–2,155, 188–9, 191–3, 195, 211–16, 218;and Armenian genocide 109–10, 183;conduct of war 100, 104–15, 102, 127,128, 171–2; constitution of 31, 58–9,63; ethnic politics in 28–33, 57–68,152–4; expansion of 10, 100, 102;official language of 28, 57, 113;Ottoman AdministrativeDecentralization Party 64; partition of113, 127, 143, 146, 172, 183–9

Index 269

Ottomanism 57, 59, 62–3, 106, 113,189–90, 212, 219, 234 no. 60

Paderewski, Ignacy 139–40, 146, 163,166–7, 252 no. 19

Palacký, František 226 no. 17Palestine 28, 54, 107, 111, 123, 127,

140–5, 187–8, 190–2, 214–15;Palestinian Arab Congress 191

Pan-Arabism 105, 189–97, 213–15, 217,219–20; League of National Action215

Pan-Germanism 13, 72, 82Pan-Islamism 32–3, 56–8, 98, 100, 105,

107–8, 113, 128, 185, 241–2 no. 81,250 no. 97

Pan-Slavism 4, 20, 22, 27, 28, 32, 44, 52,56, 62, 67, 147, 206; see also Neo-Slavism

Pan-Turkism 27, 56–7, 61–3, 65, 67–8,99–100, 106–11, 114, 172, 180–1, 185

Paris 58, 60, 65, 130, 136, 146, 177Paris Peace Conference 125, 130, 140,

142, 147–67, 174; Committee on NewStates 166; Council of Four 163, 166;Supreme Council 164; see also Sèvres,Treaty of; Versailles, Treaty of

Party of (Croat State) Right 13, 46Party of Pure Right see FrankistsPašić, Nicola 136–7Pavelic, Ante 206Peter the Great 20Petka 202Petliura, Symon 162Petrograd see St. PetersburgPiedmont 11, 214Piłsudski, Józef 36–40, 42, 68, 117–18,

124, 138–40, 149–52, 157, 159, 161,162, 164, 168, 207–11, 213, 219, 252no. 19

Pittsburgh Declaration 131, 157Plzen (Pilsen) 81Poland 4, 10, 19, 24, 25, 50–1, 54, 92,

122–5, 140, 154, 157, 171, 200,207–11, 216–17, 219; Bloc of NationalMinorities (BMN) 168; under CentralPower occupation 72, 117–18, 124,149–52; culture and language 14, 16,68; ethnic Poles 12, 15, 20–2, 24, 27,34, 52, 53, 72, 94, 96, 118, 122–3, 128,147, 207; and peace settlement 159–69;Polish Club (Austria) 18, 151; Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth 12, 20, 37,39, 40, 68, 139, 161; Polish Corridor

161; Polish Military Organization(POW) 124, 150, 209–10; PolishNational Committee 138–40, 146, 157,166; Polish Socialist Party (PPS) 36–8,41, 68, 150, 168, 208; political divisionsin 36–42, 163–9, 207–11, 252 no. 19;Social Democracy of the Kingdom ofPoland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) 37;wars with Soviets 162, 207, 211; see alsoDmowski; Endecja; Piłsudski; Sanacja

Pomerania 162Popular Front 188populism 27, 50–7, 61, 67, 109, 231 no. 17Poznań (Posen) 162Prague 44, 46, 75, 78, 80, 82, 129, 131,

162, 201, 203, 261 no. 11Preradović, Petar 86Pribićević, Svetozar 85prisoners of war (POWs) 72, 75, 77, 86–7,

128, 139, 146–8, 151, 154–5, 249 no.78, 251 no. 100

Protestantism 10, 203Prussia 10, 24, 123

Qarna’il 215

Radić, Stjepan 46–7, 48, 204, 206Rasputin, Grigorii 23Realists 42–5, 68Renner, Karl 17–18Rida, Rashid 65–6Riga, Treaty of 162Riza, Ahmed 60, 62Romania 125, 158–9, 163, 169–70, 217,

254 no. 32; ethnic Romanians 11, 12Romans 182Rome 135; Congress of Oppressed

Nationalities 137Russia 3, 7, 8, 10, 28, 30, 32, 34, 43, 61,

67, 72, 77, 80–1, 85, 86, 89, 106–7,109, 116–17, 122–3, 130, 143–4, 147,155, 164, 169, 176, 211; civil war 102,148, 157, 171–6, 207; andCzechoslovak Legion 147–9;Constituent Assembly 94, 101, 103, 251no. 5; Constitutional Democrats(Kadets) 50, 54, 57, 92–3; Duma 27,40, 57; ethnic politics in 19–27, 33, 34,37–42, 49–57, 62, 67, 114, 139,218–19; ethnic Russians 20–1, 49–51,90–2, 178–9, 181, 219; and the FirstWorld War 72, 74–5, 90–104, 114–15,120, 127, 128, 139, 151, 173; language

270 Index

163; March 1917 Revolution 23, 77,80, 88, 90, 92–5, 98, 139, 143, 147;November (Bolshevik) 1917 Revolution26, 77, 83, 88, 90, 94, 103, 174, 180;Provisional Government 90–104, 115,120, 136, 150–1; Red Army 159; 1905Revolution 27, 37, 53, 57; RussianSocial Democratic Workers’ Party(RSDWP) 51, 53–5, 172; Russification20–3, 50, 52, 53, 64, 173, 178–9, 183;Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) 50–1,54, 92–3, 98, 148; war with Japan 34;see also Bolsheviks; Mensheviks; SovietUnion

Ruthenians see Ukrainians

Sabahaddin, Prince 59–60St. Petersburg (Petrograd) 21, 54, 92–3, 95,

103Salonika 63, 87, 126, 135San Remo Conference 187, 190Sanacja 209–11Sarajevo 14, 27, 84Sarkotić, General 85Second World War 189, 206, 211, 259 no.

101Seljuks 28Serbia 14, 30, 46, 48, 84–90, 106, 115,

162, 204, 216; ethnic Serbs 11, 12,13–14, 44, 46–8, 67–8, 74–5, 84–90,126–7, 158, 170, 204–6, 219; in theFirst World War 76, 80, 125–7, 132–8;Orthodoxy 13, 86, 136, 204; relationswith Austria–Hungary 27, 46, 48,125–7, 132–8; Serbian VolunteerCorps 147; see also South Slavs;Yugoslavia; Yugoslavism

Serbo-Croatian 12, 13–14, 86, 127Seton-Watson, Robert 130, 133–5, 261 no.

11Sèvres, Treaty of 185, 257 no. 75Shamil, Imam 26shariat (shariah) 30, 100Sharifians 190, 207, 212–14Shawkat, Sami 214Shevchenko, Taras 228 no. 47Shi‘ites 26, 28, 112, 193, 195Sholom Aleichem (Solomon Rabinovitz)

182Shura (Muslim National Council) 98Siberia 19, 20, 36, 91, 148–9, 257 no. 69Sierra Leone 199Silesia, Upper 162

Skoda 81Skrypnik, Mykola 179Slavonia 11, 13–14; see also CroatiaSlavophiles 50Slovakia 11, 15–16, 42, 44–5, 46, 54,

67–8, 80–2, 89, 128, 131–2, 158, 162,201–3, 205, 261 no. 11; ethnic Slovaks147–9, 160, 170, 199, 219–20; Slovakémigrés 130; Slovak National Council132, 157; Slovak National Party 44;Slovak Populist Party 203; see alsoCzechoslovakia; Hlasists

Slovenes 12, 13, 44, 71, 74, 75, 85–8, 125,127, 132; see also South Slavs;Yugoslavia; Yugoslavism

Šmeral, Bohumir 80, 83socialism 8, 16–18, 25, 35, 36–8, 48,

49–56, 67, 80, 83–4, 88–90, 92–8,101–4, 123, 143, 144, 159, 172–83, 230no. 9

Socialist International, Second 53Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius 52Sogdians 181Sokol 16Somalia 199South Slavs 74–5, 77, 79, 80, 84–90, 115,

125, 128, 130, 132–8, 147, 149, 157; seealso Croatia; Serbia; Slovenes;Yugoslavia; Yugoslavism

South Tyrol 12, 77Soviet Union 2, 119, 171–83, 196, 198,

211, 219; decline of 183, 199, 221;relations with Turkey 185; wars withPoland 162, 207, 211

Stalin (Dzhugashvili), Joseph 119, 176,178–82; de-Stalinization 183

Starčević, Ante 13, 14, 46Steed, Wickham 130, 133–4, 145Steel Shirts 214Štefánik, Milan 132, 146, 147, 160Strossmayer, Joseph 13Stur, Ludovít, 15Štürmer, Boris 23Styria 12Subcarpathian Rus’ 157–8, 247 no. 41Sudetenland 12, 161Sufism 26Sunnis 28, 29, 32, 113, 192, 193–5Suny, Ronald 54, 95, 101–3Supilo, Frano 48, 133–8Švehla, Antonín 78Švejk 75Sweden 128Swedes 22, 24

Index 271

Switzerland 36, 128, 129, 142Sykes, Mark 144Sykes–Picot Agreement 143, 187, 251 no.

98Syria 28, 63, 107, 110, 111–14, 127,

153–4, 185, 187–95, 207, 211–17;National Bloc 195, 211–12, 214–15;(General) Syrian Congress 190–1

szlachta 12, 39

Tajikistan 181Talat Pasha 105Talib, Sayid 64Tamir, Yael 222Tanzimat 30–2, 58, 186Taryba 120, 122, 124, 159Tatars 19, 21, 27, 56–7, 62, 67, 98–100,

114, 177, 180Teschen 162Teșkilât i-Mahsusa 109–10Teutonic Knights 20Thrace 106–7Tigris 200The Times (London) 145Transcaucasia 19, 25–6, 105, 107, 109,

114, 128, 171–3, 179–80, 187–9Transjordan 111, 153, 215, 258 no. 93Transylvania 170Treaty of Lausanne 3Tripolitania see LibyaTrumbić, Ante 48, 133–8Türk Ocaği 107Turkestan 19, 26, 56–7, 99–100, 107–8,

173, 181Turkey 162, 187, 213–14; culture and

language 4, 10, 28, 57, 60–3, 68, 186,221; ethnic Turks 28–33, 48, 57–68,105–11, 126, 185–6, 189, 218–19; asrepublic 111, 183–6, 213; see alsoOttoman empire

Turkic 26, 27, 28, 53, 91, 101, 110Turkmenistan 181

Ukrainians 12, 14, 15–16, 20, 22–4, 27,50, 52, 68, 81, 91, 128, 147, 151,157–8, 162–4, 168, 171; autonomy andindependence 95–8, 101, 103, 114,173, 179–80; Rada 95–8; Society ofUkrainian Progressives (TUP) 97;Ukrainian Social Democrats (USDs)97; Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries(USRs) 53, 97, 101; Union for theLiberation of Ukraine (SVU) 128, 147

ulama’ 26umma 28, 31, 60, 189, 195, 219Uniate Church 22, 81, 91, 226 no. 11United States 7, 80, 88–9, 120, 130–1,

136, 142, 145–6, 157–61, 165Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

(USSR) see Soviet UnionUstașa 206Uzbekistan 181

Van 110Veidlinger, Jeff 182Versailles, Treaty of 162; see also Paris

Peace ConferenceVienna 10, 11, 46, 47, 72, 79, 89, 117,

133, 140, 150, 201Vilna Troupe 123Vilnius 36–7, 117, 120, 123, 162, 165Vistula 200Vital, David 143Vladivostok 148–9Vojvodina 13, 135Volga 27, 177, 180

waqfs 26Warsaw 24, 39, 117, 150, 208Weber, Max 198, 200–1, 211Weizmann, Chaim 142–6, 190Welsh 163Western Europe 4–5, 7, 45, 145; influence

of 29–31, 34, 42, 47, 56, 59, 61, 64, 66,67, 110, 130, 139, 146, 159–67, 186,187–96, 211–14

Wilson, Woodrow 117, 125, 130, 139,159–60, 187

Wolf, Lucien 166–7World War I see First World War

Yemen 113Yevsektsiia 182, 257 no. 71Yiddish 25, 54, 122–3, 142, 163, 166–7,

169, 182–3, 257 no. 69yishuv 141, 143, 145, 245 no. 15Young Turks see Committee of Union and

Progress (CUP)Yugoslavia 4, 12, 13–14, 18, 75, 88, 125,

127, 132–8, 160, 162–3, 170, 199,204–6, 216–17, 220; underCommunism 183

Yugoslavism 12, 13–14, 18, 46–8, 51, 54,68, 73, 85–90, 114, 115, 132–8, 147,219–20; Croat-Serb Coalition (HSK)48, 85, 88, 133; National Council of

272 Index

Index 273

Slovenes, Croats and Serbs 87–8;Yugoslav Committee 88, 132–8, 146,160, 161

Zagreb 13, 84, 86, 88Zaleski, August 139Zionism 25, 54, 123, 140–5, 160, 165–7,

182, 187, 190, 214; cultural 141;

General 123; in Germany 142–3;Labor 54; political 140, 143, 145;practical 140–2, 145; in Russia 144;World Zionist Organization (WZO)140–2, 146

Zürcher, Erik 63Zvonimir, King 134Zweig, Arnold 245 no. 21